Description:
"Like the great German critic Walter Benjamin, Rosenberg is a master of dialectics whose sense of art is continuous with his sense of society, and (also like Benjamin) bears no taint of compromised, out-of-work radicalism. Instead, his radicalism is very much at work, enabling him to spot and skewer fallacies, false logic and the camouflaged nudity that is a large part of the art emperor's new wardrobe. [The De-definition of Art] detects with great sensitivity the forces that are deflecting and pressuring art in the direction of esthetic and moral nullity."--Jack Kroll, Newsweek
Brief description: Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978) was one of the foremost New York intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century. He was an art critic for The New Yorker from 1962 until 1978. Rosenberg, together with Clement Greenberg, radically reshaped the interpretation of art in the post-World-War-II period by promoting and examining abstract expression. He was a professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago from 1966 until his death.