When Christopher Knight retired as the art critic at the Los Angeles Times at the end of 2025, he was the last of, arguably, the three most influential US critics of the postmodern (i.e., post-1975) era to depart their roles. Roberta Smith retired as co-chief critic at The New York Times in 2024, and Peter Schjeldahl, who went from art critic at The Village Voice to The New Yorker, passed away in late 2022. 

The trio were not only the most influential, but also the most gainfully employed—two factors that have everything to do with each other. I remember hearing Roberta Smith, speaking on a 2008 panel at Frieze when the fair was just a London event, estimate there were about 30 positions in the United States where people critiqued art full time, for one platform. I was a year into writing criticism in Los Angeles then, and I recall thinking that, while the statistic was grim, there was still a chance I’d get such a job. 

Then the number kept dwindling. Deborah Solomon estimated there were fewer than 10 critics with full-time positions in 2013; and, if the trend continues (helped along by layoffs and restructures), there could soon be zero. We’d already been mourning what Knight, Smith, and Schjeldahl represented for so many years that their departures came and went with little more than news items, especially Knight’s and Smith’s. But it’s worth pausing to note what exactly the field has lost. 

MOST CRITICS FIND their way to this work accidentally, myself included. I moved to Los Angeles to be an artist and gave freelance reviewing a try because I thought, with youthful delusion, it would be a way to make money while I made art. But soon, I was hooked, more so when I started writing for the original LA Weekly (RIP), a free publication with a circulation of more than 160,000, which meant people just stumbled upon the art criticism in its pages. I loved the responsibility and the challenge of seeing everything and platforming what thrilled me alongside what disappointed me, and of trying to figure out how to share that feeling with others both palpably and accessibly. I took seriously the task of committing to the record certain performances and exhibitions so ephemeral that sometimes no one else even documented them. I was always freelance, writing for so little that I had to write all the time. The pace took such a toll on my well-being that, when the LA Weekly was obliterated by its new owners in 2017, the cultural tragedy brought some personal relief. 

I’ve spent the past decade working on a book about Los Angeles art in the 1960s and 1970s, told through the lens of five women who ran galleries here. Extensive documentation survives of only two of my subjects’ shows—and so the Los Angeles Times archive has been invaluable, especially the writing of William Wilson, an art critic at the publication from 1965 until 1998. A colleague once told me that I give him too much attention, given that he wasn’t a major art critic; but to me, importance in this field has less to do with craft than consistency: He was there, seeing as much as he could and trying to convey what was happening in an art scene in upheaval. 

Undoubtedly though, his perspective was irreparably flawed—once during a public forum, the artist John Outterbridge called him out for never visiting Brockman Gallery, the South Central space that primarily platformed artists of color. “Mr. Wilson, why don’t you honestly tell everyone that you have not come to Brockman Gallery simply because you don’t come on that side of town? The people that you write about are the people that you drink wine with … and we’re not those people.” This was the steepest downside of the 20th-century newspaper critic: While the writer’s career received the kind of support that enabled a real relationship with an artistic community, that community was limited to one perspective.

What perspectives did Knight, Smith, and Schjeldahl, members of the last robust cohort of such critics, bring to the field? They were all the kind of “major” critics who excelled at the craft, and who maintained their voices, flair, and positions for decades. Smith is the sentence-level, close-looking type. She said that her editor at Artforum in the late 1970s, the leftist critic Max Kozloff, dismissed her as a formalist, and was probably right—she wields a descriptive precision that consistently makes it possible to see the art she writes about in the mind’s eye. Schjeldahl was less precise, but more emotive: He made readers feel what he felt, though he was also better than Smith at contextualizing, ensuring we understood where an artist fit into their milieu. 

Nonetheless, I was always frustrated with their takes, and sometimes enraged. In 2022, just months before his death and three years after he published his resplendent reflection on his career following his terminal diagnosis, Schjeldahl reviewed the Whitney Biennial for The New Yorker, in ways showing how much he had evolved (an acknowledgment of settler colonialism in a parenthetical!). But he also followed a quick, positive overview of the established artists in the show by telling on himself: “But the bulk of the Biennial is devoted to artists unfamiliar to me.” Unaccompanied by any self-criticism, the observation seemed to imply that their obscurity, not his tunnel vision, kept him from knowing about them. One such “unfamiliar” artist was Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, violently murdered early in her career. The efforts to protect her legacy have been consistent enough that those of us who pay attention to art for a living would have had many opportunities to encounter it before 2022. He wrapped his reflection on Cha by recounting his shock, after “savoring” her work, at learning of her murder from the wall label. “But the delight abides,” he wrote, having managed to say nothing at all about what in her work delighted him. 

This was nothing compared to Roberta Smith’s 2019 essay “A Sea Change in the Art World, Made by Black Creators,”in which she called two solo museum shows featuring Black artists (Martin Puryear, Kara Walker) in the same year “a striking coincidence.” She then marveled at the quality of the art by many Black artists she’d only recently truly discovered, thanks to “the rising presence of black artists of every ilk.” She of course had to mention the Dana Schutz portrait of Emmett Till, and the way its inclusion in the 2017 Whitney Biennial led to protests and allegations that Schutz had turned Black death into spectacle. Smith did not “agree” with many of the criticisms leveled against Schutz, but she was forced to acknowledge “white obliviousness and entitlement”—apparently, it seemed, for the first time. 

Neither Schjeldahl nor Smith deserve a pass, but the issue is clearly a systemic one: Editors should have been too embarrassed to publish Smith’s reflection on race, and the leading critical voices at New York’s most influential publications should not have both been white people over 70. Not that they should have been put out to pasture—and certain older white critics in the city, specifically Smith’s co-chief critic, Holland Cotter, have maintained a more deliberate commitment to open-mindedness. Newspapers should have shared their platforms with younger critics and critics of color, whose voices offer insights that the field needs. I am of course hardly the first to suggest this, but we are all screaming into an evaporating void. No leading paper in a US art capitol has ever had a non-white full-time art critic (not the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post), and now it seems likely they never will: The Post just laid off nearly all its cultural critics except for Philip Kennicott. And the news of arts journalist Calvin Tomkins’s death at age 100 in March underscored the lack further; he was the best to ever do it, yes, because he was also the only one to ever do it, holding a reliable job profiling artists for over 60 years. (Who thought it was a good idea to assign the same white guy who profiled Jean Tinguely in 1962 to profile Dana Schutz after the 2017 Whitney Biennial fallout?)

KNIGHT IN PARTICULAR seems to embody all we’ve lost—both the baby and the bathwater. From my perspective, his contributions to the field are more significant than his peers’, and yet, I argued with him most often, both in my head and on the page. In part, punching up was what I was supposed to do, especially at a local alt weekly, though I am still frustrated by a 2014 review of Marjorie Cameron’s MOCA show, in which Knight circularly argued that Cameron’s work was “rather thin” because she was “socially limited to the role of men’s muse.” 

Knight won his 2020 Pulitzer for his dogged criticism of LACMA’s redesign—he disliked the design with its “nutty” concrete walls, and memorably compared the architectural renderings to “those annoying TV ads for erectile dysfunction, the ones where a naked, hand-holding couple stretched out in separate bathtubs gazes out over an endless sea or primeval forest and contemplates the (false) promise of never-ending youth.” He nails the sentence, but more crucially, he has always understood not only the role power plays in art but his own relationship to power—and he routinely used his platform to call out its misuse. The thrust of his critiques was leveled at the out-of-touch machinations that fueled the renovation, the way it dismissed the significant holdings and role of an encyclopedic art museum (long fought for in this city), and at the repetition of long-standing patterns in Los Angeles that involve trying to force aesthetics and ideas onto the city, rather than figuring out what would best meet the needs of the art viewing public here. 

In his final column as the Times’ critic, Knight acknowledged that “every few years now there seems to be a flurry of worry about a ‘crisis in criticism.’” He went on, “I think that fuss misses the mark, however. The crisis is in publishing, not criticism.” I suspect that this misdirection—targeting criticism, rather than the industry, with its billionaire owners, that systemically devalues the craft, furthering its irrelevance by refusing to diversify its hires—reflects our feeling of helplessness. 

Knight knew the industry’s limitations from experience. In a 2015 talk at Superscript, an arts journalism conference at the Walker, Knight described getting his first newspaper job in 1980, when an editor at the defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner called him and said the paper was looking for a freelance art critic. The 77-year-old paper had never employed an art critic, but they wanted one because, after running a survey to see what made Los Angeles Times readers unhappy, they found a desire for more arts coverage—especially since the plans for the Museum of Contemporary Art LA were underway, as was a new wing at LACMA. J. Paul Getty’s recent death had also made his Malibu vanity project the world’s richest museum. Knight understood from the start that his job emerged from competition and power dynamics among Los Angeles newspapers. “My role as a professional art critic … is to sell newspapers,” he said in 2015, and “to generate traffic at our website.” This was cynical clarity, not capitulation. He’d been offered a criticism job at The New York Times in 1982, four years before Smith joined that paper, and then had the offer rescinded when the notoriously homophobic executive editor A.M. Rosenthal learned he was gay. 

I already miss Knight at the Times and what he represented. The field needs what he brought, and it needs what journalistic criticism promises at its best—that consistent, careful looking and analysis—but this kind of criticism has never come close to meeting its potential in the US. We have to stop wallowing in the wreckage of models that never worked. There’s still value in talking about the reasons for their failure; transparency around money and institutional disinvestment is important to building a less-hierarchical, hopefully more sustainable version of the field, which will be slow, painful work. For me, so far, doing this means writing for and investing my time in small independent publications that share my values—an imperfect solution, but at least it keeps me focused on what’s possible.