Michelle Marder Kamhi is an independent scholar and critic. She is the author of Bucking the Artworld Tide (2020) and Who Says That’s Art? (2014), and was co-editor of the arts journal Aristos for more than three decades. One of her main interests is art education.
Kamhi also co-authored What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand (Open Court, 2000)—which dealt with all the major arts and was praised by the American Library Association’s Choice magazine for its “well-documented . . . debunking of twentieth-century art . . . and art theory.”
Kamhi graduated from Barnard College and earned an M.A. in Art History at Hunter College. Before joining Aristos as associate editor in 1984, she had been an editor at Columbia University Press, where she worked on titles in its distinguished Records of Civilization series. She was also active as a freelance writer and editor. Among her independent projects was Books Our Children Read, a film documenting a constructive approach to resolving communal conflict over controversial literature in public school classrooms and libraries.
Kamhi is a member of the American Society for Aesthetics, the National Art Education Association, and the National Association of Scholars. She has resigned from membership in AICA-USA (the U S. branch of the International Association of Art Critics), for reasons touched on here.
Articles by her have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Arts Education Policy Review, Academic Questions, and American Greatness, among others. She also posts (irregularly) on her blog, For Piero’s Sake.
Kamhi lives in New York City with her husband and colleague, Louis Torres.
Photo copyright © 2014 by Helene Glanzberg