Challenges Arise As Top Critics Retire

When Christopher Knight stepped away from the Los Angeles Times at the end of 2025, it closed a chapter that had already been thinning for years. With Roberta Smith retiring from The New York Times in 2024 and Peter Schjeldahl dying in late 2022, three of the most influential U.S. art critics of the post-1975 era had left the field in quick succession - and with them, a model of criticism that once seemed durable.

Their departures matter not only because of their stature, but because they were among the last critics with stable, full-time institutional posts. In 2008, Smith estimated that there were about 30 such positions in the United States. By 2013, Deborah Solomon put the number at fewer than 10. If layoffs and restructurings continue, that figure could soon approach zero.

The shrinking of the profession has altered more than employment prospects. It has changed how art is recorded, argued over, and remembered. Full-time critics once had the time and institutional backing to see widely, return repeatedly to artists' work, and build a public record of exhibitions and performances that might otherwise vanish. Today, that kind of sustained attention is far rarer.

The article also looks back at the author's own path into criticism, including work for the original LA Weekly, which had a circulation of more than 160,000 before it was shut down by new owners in 2017. That paper's reach meant art writing could appear in front of readers who had not sought it out, a condition that helped criticism function as part of civic life rather than a niche specialty.

Los Angeles figures prominently in that history. The Los Angeles Times archive has long been essential for documenting the city's art scene, especially through the writing of William Wilson, who served as the paper's art critic from 1965 to 1998. Yet the piece also underscores the limits of that older model. At one public forum, John Outterbridge challenged Wilson for failing to visit Brockman Gallery in South Central, pointing to the distance between the critic's social world and the artists he covered.

That tension remains central to the field's present crisis. The old newspaper critic had reach, authority, and time, but not always breadth. The newer landscape offers fewer jobs, less continuity, and a thinner archive. What is disappearing is not only a profession, but a particular way of witnessing art as it unfolds in public.

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