Art Critic Christopher Knight Retires From LA Times
The Pulitzer-winning journalist said he'll keep writing, but the "daily journalism thing is done.”
Art critic Christopher Knight will retire from the Los Angeles Times on Friday, November 28, fellow staff member Jessica Gelt announced in a newsletter last week.
As the paper's staff art critic, Knight published exhibition reviews and commentary on the city's arts institutions, writing for the publication for 36 years. In 2020, he won a Pulitzer Prize in criticism for his work evaluating the changes at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as the institution prepared for its forthcoming expansion, demonstrating “extraordinary community service by a critic.” Knight was previously named a finalist for the prize three times, in 1991, 2001, and 2007, and won the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation’s lifetime achievement award. His last column for the Los Angeles Times will run on December 1.
“I'll keep writing, but after 45 years the daily journalism thing is done,” Knight told Hyperallergic in an email. “It has been a privilege, and it has been fun (mostly). Bless the readers!”
Describing his career in art criticism as an “accident” in a podcast interview with Hyperallergic co-founder Hrag Vartanian in 2020, Knight got his start in the 1970s working as a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and later became a consultant for the Smithsonian Institution in Los Angeles and the Lannan Foundation. His first journalism job was at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.
“One of the things I learned in art museums is that there are two audiences to be served,” Knight told Vartanian. “If you serve only the general public, the art public will abandon you. If you serve only the art public, the general public won't bother with you, because there are many other things for them to do. So I began to apply that to newspapers, which are pretty much the same thing.”
In her note to staff, Gelt, a staff writer at the LA Times, described Knight as “everything a truly excellent critic should be.”
"It’s impossible to overstate the loss Knight’s departure represents for the paper and Los Angeles, or what a tireless, generous, inspiring colleague he is,” Gelt wrote.
Christopher Knight on the Hyperallergic Podcast:
Hrag Vartanian
