at home: Norma Lytton Lecture | A Global Criticism for a Global Art World

Jason Farago (Yale BA 2005), art critic for the New York Times, delivers this year's Norma Lytton lecture.

Norma Lytton Lecture

In the last 30 years, museums, galleries, fairs, and publications have taken a worldwide approach to art—but how can an art critic make substantive judgements when his or her beat spans the entire globe? In this talk, Jason Farago, art critic for the New York Times, considers how museums should approach the art of foreign cultures, how viewers can appreciate things they don’t fully understand, and how criticism can offer a view of art as a continuous flow of people, images, and ideas.

Generous support for this program has been provided by the Norma Lytton Fund for Docent Education, established in memory of Norma Lytton by her family. Lytton was an active docent at the Center for more than twenty years and subsequently spent a decade engaged in research for the Center’s Department of Paintings and Sculpture.

About Jason Farago

Farago has served as an art critic for the New York Times since 2017. Before that he was the first US-based art critic for the Guardian, and he has been a regular contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and other publications. Farago was also the editor and cofounder of the art and culture magazine Even, whose run is anthologized in "Out of Practice: Ten Issues of Even, 2015–18" (Motto Books). He has published catalogue essays on the art of Sheila Hicks, Simon Hantaï, Kishio Suga, Julia Dault, Meleko Mogkosi, and others. In 2017 he was awarded the inaugural Rabkin Prize for art criticism.