"Before an audience of students and colleagues, a scholar's frank disorientation might be damning, but in a reviewer of exhibitions, a willingness to be disoriented can be put to electrifying use, communicating to readers the excitement that the writer felt in the face of the art and leading to questions that are, in Clark's words, "abstract and dangerous.""
"In 1973, the then-30-year-old lecturer at London's Camberwell College of Art had turned heads with the simultaneous publication of a pair of books based on his PhD dissertation at the Courtauld Institute of Art: The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-1851, which were seen as a one-two punch against the art historical establishment on behalf of a new, Marxist-inflected social history of art."
"(Clark had earlier been part of a radical groupuscule of "hooligan pedants" excommunicated, for reasons opaque to an outsider, from the Situationist International, and still proclaims his "root and branch opposition to capitalism.") He taught at UCLA, then at Leeds, and in 1980 was hired by Harvard, where he immediately butted heads with the distinguished scholar of Renaissance art Sydney J. Freedberg."
In April 2008 a prominent art critic began publishing exhibition reviews in a major journal, debuting with simultaneous Poussin and Courbet shows at the Metropolitan Museum described as leaving the critic "elated and disoriented." The critic argued that disorientation in reviewing can electrify readers and generate "abstract and dangerous" questions. Earlier influence came from two 1973 books based on a PhD that pioneered a Marxist-inflected social history of art. The critic also had ties to radical Situationist circles, professed opposition to capitalism, and held academic posts at UCLA, Leeds, and Harvard, where a dispute over student choices led to censure.
Read at The Nation
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