Critics Who Help Readers Notice More

Ruskin's great instruction was simply to look harder. Modern Painters defended Turner by describing real skies, clouds and water so exactly that readers went outside to check, and The Stones of Venice reads Gothic carving as evidence of the freedom of the masons who made it. His The Elements of Drawing, a practical manual for beginners, still teaches attention better than most art books. The prose can be overwhelming and his opinions were often extreme, so start with selections from Modern Painters and a sketchbook.

Clark's television series Civilisation, broadcast by the BBC in 1969, walked viewers through buildings and paintings and showed them where to look, at a carved capital or a gesture in a fresco, in a way no one had done on screen before. Its confident view of a Western canon now looks narrow, and the BBC answered it with Civilisations in 2018. His short book Looking at Pictures is the better guide for a reader: each chapter spends a long time with one painting, Velázquez's Las Meninas among them, and models how to stand in front of it.

Kael wrote about films as they feel in the moment of watching, in fast, conversational prose, and that made readers trust their own pleasure and boredom. Her 1967 review of Bonnie and Clyde for The New Yorker, which explained why its violence and comedy unsettled audiences, helped rescue the film and announced a new kind of criticism. She was there from 1968 to 1991. Her collections, such as I Lost It at the Movies, are best read for her close attention to performances and pacing rather than for her verdicts, which were often wilfully contrary.

Huxtable became the first full-time architecture critic at an American newspaper when The New York Times appointed her in 1963, and in 1970 she won the first Pulitzer Prize for criticism. She wrote for people walking past buildings, not architects: her columns explained why the demolition of the old Pennsylvania Station mattered, how a plaza works or fails at street level, and what developers' choices did to a neighbourhood. The collections Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard? and Kicked a Building Lately? are as sharp and funny as their titles.

Ways of Seeing, Berger's four-part BBC series of 1972 and the book made with Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, Michael Dibb and Richard Hollis, changed what viewers notice in a painting: who owns it, who is looking at whom, how a nude differs from a naked person, and how oil painting's love of possessions lives on in advertising. Some arguments now feel blunt, but the habit of asking who an image serves sticks for life. His later essays, such as About Looking, are gentler and just as observant, especially on animals, photographs and rural life.

Tynan's reviews in The Observer from 1954 made readers see performances in physical detail: how an actor moved, paused or held a stage. His 1956 review of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, which said he could not love anyone who did not wish to see it, helped turn a divisive play into a landmark, and his descriptions of Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson are still the best record of how they acted. He then became the first literary manager of the National Theatre. Start with the collection Curtains or the later selection Tynan on Theatre.

Sister Wendy, a Carmelite nun who had lived largely in solitude, became an unlikely BBC star in the 1990s with series such as Sister Wendy's Grand Tour and The Story of Painting. Her method was simple and contagious: stand close, describe exactly what is there, the turn of a wrist, a patch of light, the expression on a minor figure's face, and then say plainly what it made her feel. She spoke without notes in long single takes. Her book The Story of Painting, made with the publisher Dorling Kindersley, is a friendly first art history.

Nairn taught readers to notice ordinary places. His 1955 special issue of the Architectural Review, Outrage, coined the word subtopia for the bland sprawl of car parks, wires and signs swallowing British towns, and his guides Nairn's London and Nairn's Towns describe pubs, railway arches and back streets with a passion usually reserved for cathedrals. His BBC series Nairn Across Britain, filmed in the 1970s, shows him in front of the buildings he loved and hated. Read Nairn's London with the book in your pocket, and many entries still guide a walk.

Sontag changed how readers look at photographs. On Photography, the essays she published in The New York Review of Books from 1973, asks what happens when we collect images of the world instead of experiencing it, and how a photograph of suffering can move us or numb us; Regarding the Pain of Others, in 2003, revisited and partly revised that argument. Her earlier essays Notes on Camp and Against Interpretation, which asked critics to attend to the sensuous surface of a work before its meaning, are short enough to read in a sitting and still provoke.

Dance vanishes the moment it ends, and Croce, The New Yorker's dance critic from 1973 to 1996, made it stay on the page. Her reviews of George Balanchine's ballets and of choreographers from Twyla Tharp to Paul Taylor describe steps, phrasing and musical timing so precisely that readers who had never seen a ballet learned what to watch for. Her book on the films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers analyses every number. Her 1994 refusal to review a work she had not seen provoked a fierce debate. She died in December 2024; start with the collection Afterimages.

Hughes, Time magazine's art critic for three decades, explained modern art to sceptics without talking down. His 1980 BBC series and book The Shock of the New, made with producer Lorna Pegram, travelled from the Eiffel Tower to Pop Art and explained why each movement looked as it did, with a deep, funny voice that could also be withering about hype and the art market. American Visions does the same for the United States, and his books on Goya and on Barcelona show his gift for tying art to place. Opinionated, but always grounded in the object.

From 1972 to 1982 James wrote the Observer's television column, and he treated a medium most critics ignored as something worth watching closely, describing how presenters held a camera's attention or how a sports commentator's voice built tension, in jokes so precise they double as analysis. The columns are collected in Visions Before Midnight, The Crystal Bucket and Glued to the Box. Later he wrote fine essays on poetry and the long, generous Cultural Amnesia. Start with the TV columns: they show how to watch a screen with your brain switched on.

A poet before he was a critic, Schjeldahl wrote about art for The New Yorker from 1998 to his death in 2022 in short, vivid reviews that describe exactly how a painting hits you: the scale of a brushstroke, the temperature of a colour, the odd detail you only see on a second look. He was frank about what bored him and generous to unfashionable artists. Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light, a selection of his reviews, is a superb introduction, and his late essay The Art of Dying is one of the finest pieces of personal criticism.

Ebert reviewed for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013, and in 1975 became the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize. His Great Movies essays, written over many years, each return to a single film and point to specific shots, cuts and performances, and he encouraged viewers to pause a film and study one frame, a method he taught in shot-by-shot sessions at festivals. On television with Gene Siskel he made argument about films part of popular culture. His plain, warm prose welcomes beginners without simplifying.

Marcus hears history inside popular songs. Mystery Train, from 1975, reads Elvis Presley, Sly Stone, the Band and Randy Newman as American stories about ambition and freedom; Lipstick Traces connects the Sex Pistols to Dada and the Situationists; The Old, Weird America, about Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, sends readers back to the strange folk records of the 1920s. You come away listening to a familiar song for its grain, its odd lyric or a singer's catch of breath. His sentences can be dense, so begin with Mystery Train.

Meades has made dozens of television essays about places and buildings, many directed by Francis Hanly, and he looks where others do not: Brutalist estates, bungalows, Victorian civic swagger, the suburbs of Birmingham. Delivered deadpan in black suit and dark glasses, in dense, funny language, his films argue that the overlooked built environment tells you more about a country than its monuments; Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness is a good start. In print, Museum Without Walls collects the essays. Not easy listening, but no one makes you look harder at a car park.

Bangs wrote about rock for Creem and Rolling Stone in the 1970s as if the records were happening to him in real time, and that urgency makes readers hear noise, feedback and amateur energy as part of the music rather than flaws. His long piece on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks explains how the album's repetitions and pauses work on a listener better than any technical analysis. He died at 33 in 1982. The collection Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, edited by Greil Marcus, is the place to start; expect excess along with brilliance.

Saltz, for many years New York magazine's senior art critic and a Pulitzer winner in 2018, writes and posts as if he is standing next to you in a gallery, pointing at a corner of a canvas and asking what it is doing. A former long-distance truck driver and self-described failed painter, he is open about his own taste and suspicious of art-world snobbery. His book How to Be an Artist is a set of short, practical rules that help viewers as much as makers, and his essay My Life as a Failed Artist explains why he looks so hard. Loud on social media, careful on the page.

Als, a New Yorker theatre critic since the early 2000s and winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, writes reviews that notice who is on stage, who is watching and what a production assumes about both. He reads performances closely, an actor's posture or a director's choice to hold a silence, and connects them to race, gender and American history without losing the play itself. His essay collection White Girls, mixing criticism and memoir, is the fullest showcase. He also curates exhibitions, which shows in his eye for visual detail.

The Observer's art critic since 1999, Cumming writes some of the most attentive prose about paintings in Britain. Her books are detective stories of looking: The Vanishing Man follows a nineteenth-century Reading bookseller's obsession with a lost Velázquez portrait, Thunderclap traces her father's life through Dutch painting, and A Face to the World reads self-portraits from Dürer to Warhol for what artists chose to reveal. Each makes you want to go and stand in front of the picture with her observations in your head. Start with The Vanishing Man.

Kermode has spent decades talking about films on radio and podcast, most famously alongside Simon Mayo, and he is best at explaining craft: why a film score works, how editing builds tension, what a horror film does to an audience. His BBC series Mark Kermode's Secrets of Cinema breaks down genres, from heist films to romcoms, into the techniques that make them work, with clips as evidence. His book The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex is a funny defence of watching properly. An enthusiast without snobbery about popular films.

Classical and contemporary music is the hardest art to describe in words, and Ross, The New Yorker's music critic since 1996, does it better than anyone. The Rest Is Noise tells the story of twentieth-century music through Vienna, Weimar Berlin, Soviet Moscow and Hollywood, and explains what to listen for in Strauss, Shostakovich or Steve Reich without requiring you to read a score. His website once offered audio guides to go with each chapter. Wagnerism, his later book, follows one composer's influence through literature, film and politics.

Cole, a novelist and photographer, wrote the On Photography column for The New York Times Magazine from 2015 to 2019, and each one teaches a way of looking at a single picture or photographer: what is outside the frame, how a shadow carries meaning, what tourist photographs share with war photographs. The essays are gathered in Known and Strange Things and Black Paper. Because he makes photographs himself, his attention to light and composition is practical as well as poetic. A calm, exact guide for anyone who scrolls past thousands of images a day.

Morris, critic at large for The New York Times, moves between films, television, music and advertising and notices the gestures and habits that a culture repeats without seeing them: how actors are lit, who gets the close-up, what a pop video says about the body. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2012 for his film reviews at The Boston Globe and again in 2021 for essays on race and culture at the Times. His podcast work, including Still Processing with Jenna Wortham, shows his ear for argument. Start with his essays on American music.