The Full-Contact Critic

Lee Siegel is something of a legend among critics – a blunt, no-holds-barred assessor of other people’s talent and worth, working in an era when most critics restrict themselves to polite asides and gentle rebukes. So it’s not a surprise that Siegel harbors some pretty dark views of the cultural scene in general, using a new book to rail against “an art world obsessed with money; business-savvy cultural producers out for a buck and little else; and a complacent review corps backing the whole thing up by issuing bland, rubber-stamped judgments.”