Last Chance for Eden: Selected Art Criticism, 1979-1995.

Most daily-newspaper art critics are at least readable because they arrive at their desks from places like J-school, the city beat, or the sports department, where plain English is still spoken. But they're often either ignorami who don't know Kunst from Koons or "arts writers" forced by broadsheet downsizing to cover everything from the local woodwind quintet to installation art based on Lacanian reconsiderations of gender transgression (one of my favorites). So, with notable exceptions, they have nothing of interest to say to anyone in the art world. Art-critic art critics, on the other hand, are given to stringing together sentences like (chosen practically at random from the first art magazine I found on the shelf): "Beyond this partial, post-fem vision, the artist's output makes a clear statement regarding the complex construction of the subject in contemporary societies, wherein the engineering of the self consequently promotes infinite possibilities." All those weightless abstractions, wimpy predicates, cloudy pseudo-insights, and a cop-out denouement offer nothing to the reader in search of something a little more informative than hip academic fog.

What's a newspaper to do? Well, it could hire away - or clone - the Los Angeles Times' Christopher Knight. He's so good he's even bearable in large doses like Last Chance for Eden.

Truth be told, the Times didn't nurture Knight into a first-rate critic within its own corporate hothouse; it got him fully formed in 1989, from the now-defunct Hearst paper the Herald Examiner, which had in turn obtained him in 1980 - preaccessorized with intelligence, taste, and curatorial experience - from the La Jolla Museum of Art. The Herald had known it couldn't compete directly with the Times (a terrible, looming, fire-the-architecture-critic-if-he-undermines-the-publisher's-rea l-estate-deals presence in Los Angeles) in terms of official bourgeois cultural verdicts. So it settled for the "alternative" role, and for a brief, shining moment, Knight was allowed to address that small segment of newspaper readers who read about art as if (horrors!) they actually know something about it. Knight took to his wide berth like Lari Pittman to a new silhouette. By the time he came over to the Times, he'd already developed his wonderful nose for the "What's really going on here?" factor in every exhibition, an elegantly breezy prose style, and, most important, a smile-edged, neither-bitter-nor-booster attitude.

Los Angeles, like all American art scenes outside New York, thinks about art largely in municipal terms. "Geez, we ain't producin' nothin' like what I saw in that big warehouse show down by the Brooklyn Bridge, which is why I'm thinkin' about movin' to Williamsburg," the embittered say. "Bullshit! L.A. art is the cutting edge of the where-it's-happenin' Pacific Rim; only the narrow-minded New York establishment refuses to see it," the boosters respond. (New York, meanwhile, just goes on assuming that its art is everybody's.) Critics in Los Angeles are under great pressure to admit they're either part of the solution or part of the problem, and to function as the former.

How gutsy, then, of Knight to rebut (just when the L.A. market was getting rolling again in 1983) a catalogue essay claiming that those two manufacturers of slick paintinglike artoids, Charles Arnoldi and Laddie John Dill, "are artists of the '80s, specifically in relation to their involvement with gestural imagery and new expressionism." Knight responded, "If stylish design has become the mainstream for painting in the 1980s, then God help us." He has the daring for unfettered dissing, clearly, but also a more crucial skill for a critic who doesn't want to be put on retainer by the chamber of commerce: the ability to write measured praise, particularly for minor masters. (Nothing reads worse than a booster trying to make a Manet out of a molehill.) Consider, then, this finale on Wallace Barman, the California assemblagist killed in a car wreck at age 50, in 1976:

Berman's work turns on the complex crosscurrents that saw the existentialism of the 1950s erupt into the libertine radicalism of the 1960s. The self-satisfaction which marked the mood of the Eisenhower era, and which had rendered left-wing politics virtually inert, had nonetheless conspired to establish a potentially volatile situation. Without a political channel, resistance to prevailing values was directed into oppositional ways of living and of thinking - which is to say, into the life of a counterculture. Berman's is an art that speaks tellingly of those extraordinary years.

Notice the succinct summary of the post-Eisenhower situation. Check out the compact description of how a counterculture is formed. And examine the precise restraint (called proper context) in the favorable judgment of Berman's art.

After an elegant riff like that, it probably seems trivial to quibble with Last Chance. If I were as graceful in print as Knight, I might already have worked in my nit-picking, but I ain't, so here's an addendum of small demurrals. Knight is a little too kind to his own generation's artists (especially coyly tacky ones like Larry Johnson and Jim Isermann). He overrates the already overrated Mike Kelley in three successive essays. And the book could have been trimmed. Knight's reflections on such artists as Hendrik Goltzius, John Frederick Kensett, and (in our own time) Ellen Phelan might have served a journalistic purpose when they were published, but it doesn't carry over to the necessary record.

His description of one of Robert Hughes' thunderous lecture-performances, however, does. Typically, Knight neither entirely condemns Hughes' gambit of simultaneously playing instructive elitist to the proles (who want a touch o' class) and satirical populist to the guilty cognoscenti (who want a reunion with common sense), nor does he stand and clap. He merely points out where the guy's right and where he's wrong. And my admiration for Knight's judiciousness comes from one who thinks, contrary to Knight, that Hughes is too generous to Eric Fischl; the edges of the man's figures are as nuanced as the ones on those flat cutouts of Clinton you can be photographed with on the Mall. So, I say to myself as I fold over the last page of the galleys, maybe it's better in the long run to be a little too upbeat about the current fare a la Knight than it would be to star alongside Australian Bob in a remake of that Lemmon-Matthau vehicle, Grumpy Old Men.

Peter Plagens is an abstract painter and the art critic for Newsweek.