Employing a chronological approach, this beautifully illustrated text can serve as a brief one semester introduction to art history, or as a core text in art appreciation.

The mainstream press often celebrates the ‘tweeting’, ‘facebooking’ and ‘gramming’ of art commentary. Yet online forms of art criticism have a much longer and more varied history than we think. Far preceding the art discussions happening on the likes of Twitter and Facebook. Before art discussions took place on social media, there were networked art projects and art critical Bulletin Board Systems, email discussion lists and blogs. Art Criticism Online: A History provides the first in-depth history of art criticism following the Internet. The book considers the core stages of development and considers where critical practice is heading in the future. Charlotte Frost's Art Criticism Online provides a much needed account and indispensable survey of the ways in which Western art criticism has been profoundly affected and changed by the online environment. Building on the history of networked and participatory criticism predating the Internet, Frost traces three different phases of online art criticism unfolding in early discussion groups, on listservs, and within today's blogosphere and social media platforms. The book expertly captures nuanced transformations in art criticism's content, form and style, analyzing how approaches have shifted in response to the evolution of the art world terrain. Art Criticism Online successfully manages to provide readers with a map of the dynamic expressions of today's critical culture. --Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of Digital Art, Whitney Museum, Director/Chief Curator, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons/The New School So what happened to art criticism, anyway? This lively history is a vital resource for anyone interested in this question. Drawing on a half-century of examples, the book discusses the new, experimental writing practices the internet has made possible, and its destructive effects, making a persuasive case that art criticism hasn't gone away it's just changed radically. --Michael Connor, Artistic Director, Rhizome

Art criticism is spurned by universities, but widely produced and read. It is seldom theorized and its history has hardly been investigated. The State of Art Criticism presents an international conversation among art historians and critics that considers the relation between criticism and art history and poses the question of whether criticism may become a university subject. Contributors include Dave Hickey, James Panero, Stephen Melville, Lynne Cook, Michael Newman, Whitney Davis, Irit Rogoff, Guy Brett and Boris Groys.

How is art criticism to be understood within an expanding artistic field? A look at its history and its manifestations within globalized conditions shows the variety of the genre, of the criteria and of the styles of writing. This reader is an attempt to bring a diverse range of art-critical voices and perspectives into conversation with each other, with texts from the 18th century to the present. The editors Beate Söntgen and Julia Voss have invited colleagues from various geographical and intellectual backgrounds to present and discuss the art critics of their choice, choosing one example from their respective bodies of work to comment upon. How have these writers approached art criticism? Which styles do they employ? What makes them extraordinary? What can we learn from their writings today, and why is it important in its contemporary context? BEATE SÖNTGEN (*1963) is professor of art history at Leuphana University Lüneburg. She studied art history, philosophy, and modern German literature in Marburg and Berlin. She is director of the DFG Research Training Group "Cultures of Critique: Forms, Media, Effects" and co-director of the program "PriMus - Doctoral Studies in Museums." JULIA VOSS (*1974) is an honorary professor at Leuphana University Lüneburg. She studied art history, modern German literature, and philosophy in Berlin and London. She is herself an art critic and journalist and was deputy head of the arts section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

In this concluding volume of the series Disciplines in Art Education, an author-art critic and an art educator discuss the place of the art criticism in the classroom.