Category: Critic
Nationality: American
Last Year: 72
A relatively quiet year for the New Yorker’s virtuosic chief art critic, though it should be allowed that a) we’re still digesting his dazzling 2008 collection of columns, Let’s See; and b) he did have an online spat with Geoff Dyer which ended with Schjeldahl calling the English novelist a ‘motherfucker’. Flame wars aside, he continues to look, think and write on a level several leagues above his peers. On the New Museum’s Younger than Jesus, to select a random example: ‘Novelty keeps us spry, and it cleans up after itself by being gone in a minute.’ This year, once again, the author of that worldly-wise slap was pretty much unassailable.