Michael Fried attacks on literalism take center stage in a new collection that recasts the 87-year-old American critic as a writer of uncommon clarity and conviction. Long tagged as a formalist scold by some contemporaries, Fried emerges in this volume as a poet-critic whose arguments against theatricality feel newly relevant in an era flooded with market-driven trends and machine-made images.
The set from Bloomsbury gathers decades of work, including criticism, prose poems, and a book-length interview with himself. Titled Collected Writings: Essays, Poems, Interviews and slated for 2026, the project extends the debates sparked by his still-controversial 1967 Artforum essay “Art and Objecthood,” which criticized the rising Minimalist scene for what he called its literalness and theatricality.
Michael Fried attacks on literalism, not theater itself
Fried’s target has never been theater in general. Rather, he argues against a narcissistic theatricality centered on the “I,” where irony and cleverness seek audience approval.
Contrary to caricatures that cast him as a defender of staid tradition, his writing, including his poems, shows a sensitivity to language and the movement of thought. Far from a pessimist, he often backs artists and ideas that press forward with intelligence and risk.
Across the new collection, he urges readers to resist the automatic embrace of whatever the market or fashion rewards. He draws on memories of Edward Said, the diaries of Franz Kafka, and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus to register moral outrage over the suffering of Palestinians, writing that fond recollections cannot withstand “present horrors.”
In a tribute to sculptor Anthony Caro, a close friend, he calls for extraordinary recognition of Caro’s late work, describing it as worthy of fireworks and public celebration. Fried favors artists who create absorbing work in conversation with demanding precedents, naming Caro, Kenneth Noland, Jeff Wall, Douglas Gordon, and Philippe Parreno as exemplars driven more by inquiry than by headlines or prizes.
Fried describes “absorption” as an experience that draws viewers into a concentrated encounter, rather than meeting them with spectacle or participation. In his reading, the Minimalism he opposed prized an exhibitionist scale and invited audiences to “complete” the work through their presence.
He rejects the notion that art depends on the viewer to exist, arguing instead for works that sustain their own internal gravity and mystery. He presents this stance as a long resistance to Literalism and an effort to preserve a modernist inheritance that still shelters contemporary art.
That defense, he suggests, is more urgent in a world saturated with algorithmic images that reduce art to readily legible effects. In this, his concerns echo those of artists using historical narratives to interrogate present crises, as seen in projects like the Native history of NYC oysters reflection on art and ecology.
Fried often returns to “conviction,” a term he uses to describe criticism that takes a stand on what will endure. Citing Charles Baudelaire’s charge that criticism be “partial, passionate, and political,” he argues that disruptive “never before” moments reframe art history.
He points to Manet’s Olympia and Luncheon on the Grass, both 1863, as introducing a charged “facingness” that arrests the viewer. He also credits Anthony Caro, in dialogue with their exchanges, with treating smallness as an autonomous sculptural idea rather than a reduced monumentality.
For Fried, these “never before” ruptures carry political stakes. They demonstrate that art history remains unsettled, with puzzles awaiting close, committed attention.
While he has been labeled a doctrinaire formalist, his writing and allegiances suggest a more exploratory temperament. He does at times invoke Denis Diderot’s petite église invisible, the small circle of devoted makers and viewers.
Yet Fried’s thought, more various than that rubric implies, resists a single orthodoxy. He read Clement Greenberg carefully but declined to follow a rigid ledger of good and bad.
Like Caro’s small table sculptures, which imply ground without touching it, Fried’s criticism approaches the foundation of belief while keeping its autonomy. He treats art history and criticism as a poetic practice.
In “The Prose Poem,” he writes that the medium is thought itself. His method is to trace a line of thinking to its limit, then pick up a new thread and continue, building a cluster of ideas through extension.
The aim is continuity, to renew modernity by sustained attention rather than distraction, and to keep faith with absorbing art over easy theatrics. Institutions such as the Musée d’Orsay and research centers like Columbia University remain among the sites where the kinds of historical and critical debates Fried values continue to unfold.