Contributor

David Carrier

David Carrier is a philosopher who writes art criticism. He has published books on Nicolas Poussin’s paintings, on the art writing of Charles Baudelaire, on the abstractions of Sean Scully, on the art museum and on the prospects for a world art history. And with Joachim Pissarro, he has co-authored two books on what they call wild art, art outside the art world system. Currently his writing appears in Brooklyn Rail and Hyperallergic. His recent books include Philosophical Skepticism as the Subject of Art: Maria Bussmann’s Drawings (Bloomsbury, 2022), Art Writing On Line: The State of the Art World (Cambridge Scholars, 2022) and In Caravaggio’s Shadow: Naples as a Work of Art (Thames & Hudson, forthcoming in 2025).

Four Images of a Neapolitan Rebellion

Visual representation of a rebellion like Masaniello’s is tricky, because an artist needs to choose to present just a moment of a temporally extended action.

essay · Issue 6 ·

How to Make Great Art More Accessible

Academic art history and the art museum grew up together in 1820s Prussia.

essay · Issue 10 ·

The Best Painting in Naples

In Caravaggio’s painting there is not even an apparent connection between heavenly and terrestrial worlds. The heavenly observers look down, but no one looks up to them. The long outstretched right hand of the lower angel descends, but he, unobserved by anyone below, does not act on the human world.

essay · Issue 3 ·

The Flash Mob, A Novel Art Form

Just as historians usefully identity precedents for monochrome or still life painting, so we can construct a pre-history for the flash mob. In nineteenth-century Italian opera’s crowd scenes and in numerous dancing scenes in Hollywood films, you see music animating urban life. Suddenly the crowd is brought together by a song.

essay ·

A Sketch by God the Painter?

When in the fourteenth century a French knight displayed to pilgrims what he claimed was the blood-stained shroud of Christ, naturally that discovery attracted a great deal of interest.

review ·

A Trans-Atlantic Migration

Bois and his colleagues at October changed, for a few decades, the way that art historians dealing with modernism in America worked.

review · Issue 9 ·

Bringing the history of Naples back to life in a great public art museum

With over 150 opera costumes from the San Carlo opera house, many of them on mannequins, and more than 300 porcelain objects from the Royal Factory of Capodimonte, this was a very Neapolitan exercise in its overstimulation.

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The Apples of Cézanne

If you’re to understand Cezanne’s marginal artworld status, which remained important through most of his lifetime, then it’s important to consider a claim that will surprise most present day viewers. To most early critics and even to many fellow late nineteenth-century artists, he seemed simply to be an incompetent painter. And, in context, that judgment wasn’t crazy.

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Two Great Frenchmen in Seventeenth-Century Rome

Genre fantasies, which were popular in the seventeenth century, played a significant role in the process by which two French-born men who worked in Rome became identified as French painters.

review · Issue 7 ·