Art critic Jed Perl’s "Magicians and Charlatans"

The Harry Ransom Center welcomes Jed Perl, art critic for The New Republic, and Peter Kayafas, Director of the Eakins Press Foundation, to discuss their work on Magicians and Charlatans: Essays on Art and Culture and the way that artists, writers, and publishers have responded to the digital age. The discussion takes place Thursday, February 7, at 7 p.m. at the Ransom Center. A book signing will follow.

In Magicians and Charlatans, Perl distinguishes between artists he considers magicians—people who seek to create great art—and charlatans—who are merely seeking fame or profit. Perl does not shy away from making controversial assertions. In his reprinted 2002 essay on Gerhard Richter, he dismisses Richter’s retrospective as “a hymn to deracination, a visual moan.” He laments the commercialization of art, the age of Warholism, and the new “market-driven art world.” Perl offers praise for Meyer Schapiro, Lincoln Kirstein, and the eighteenth-century French painter, Jean-Siméon Chardin.

Perl’s book, published in October by the Eakins Press Foundation, has received praise from The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. Perl has been an art critic at The New Republic for two decades, and has written for Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. He is currently working on the first full-length biography of Alexander Calder.