ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the writing of the young university-educated art critics who came to prominence in the early 1970s and their ambivalent relationship to developments in radical and post-conceptual art. It considers how critics such as the Evening Standard's Richard Cork and the Guardian's Caroline Tisdall regarded their role as critics when writing about art which no longer conformed to older formalist critical norms and criteria. It suggests that the evaluative function of the critic was closely tied to their commitment to their public readership, not easily reconciled to their nominal commitments to the artists they foregrounded. The chapter then focuses on the career and writing of the critic Peter Fuller, examining how his criticism shifted from an enthusiasm for radical artists at the beginning of the decade to his later rejection of those artistic practices influenced by post-structuralism.
