Paper Museum: Writing About Painting, Mostly.

Over the last ten years Andrew Graham-Dixon has served as the art critic for The Independent, which for a while after its inception during the mid '80s height of Thatcherism, was London's freshest daily, the voice of an opposition that has since come to power. Today the paper seems staler - politically bland, culturally warmed-over, and full of catchy headlines, often about Martin Amis, that are followed by nonstories. Within this hackish context, Graham-Dixon shines. He would make an ideal guest at one of the artistic Tuscan house parties of which the Prince of Wales, in his djellaba, dreams to be host.

Graham-Dixon writes clearly if rather grandiloquently, in the manner of the better public television narrations, and does his homework, trawling dutifully through history books and exhibition catalogues for recyclable biographical bits, quotes by Hazlitt or Ruskin at the ready. Doggedly, he seeks the spiritual dimension, whether in religious paintings by Old Masters or, in his occasional dealings with the art of this century, through what this belated Existentialist persistently refers to as the Void. Graham-Dixon is also young, good-looking, well-read and well-bred, respectful toward his elders, and has therefore been rewarded with plummy publishing and broadcasting contracts: a monograph on Howard Hodgkin, A History of British Art, a BBC2 special on Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa (a favorite Graham-Dixon subject), and another, about the Renaissance, in the works.

Now, on the occasion of Paper Museum, a collection of his newspaper columns, he is being touted by his publishers as the next Robert Hughes, and is the recipient of a thrilling endorsement from Hughes himself: "Graham-Dixon," goes the blurb, "is the most gifted English art critic of his generation." Like his Australian benefactor, Graham-Dixon does come up with some good, novelistic leads: "On a still summer evening, beside a pool where plump cattle have gathered, above a spreading landscape of fields and shining lakes and the silhouette of far-off mountains, someone is about to be skinned alive" (about Claude Lorrain's Landscape with the Flaying of Marsyas). He is good on Holbein, on David's late portraits, and on Michelangelo, Mantegna, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Ad Reinhardt; a little boring about Rembrandt's and David's history paintings; and full-out smarmy about his pet passion, Gericault, who provides the locus for some terribly disingenuous-sounding teenage reminiscences, as well as for a fatuous, transparently competitive dig at Julian Barnes, who has also "claimed" The Raft of the Medusa, in his History of the World in 10% Chapters.

Hughes' windy characterization comes to rest on a very shaky construct: that Graham-Dixon is "of" his generation. Within this collection of sixty-two essays ("writings about painting, mostly," as the subtitle quite nasally informs us) produced during a period remarkable for extreme formal diversity in the visual arts - one that is furthermore regarded as nothing less than a risorgimento for young British art - there are precisely two pieces, about Rachel Whiteread and Lucian Freud, concerning living artists. A total of three others address the work of artists - Warhol, Guston, and de Kooning - who, though dead, can at least be thought of as contemporary. The twentieth century as a whole is represented by less than a quarter of this book.

I can think of a few likely explanations for this sorry situation, ranging from the conservatism of middlebrow Britain and the Vermeer-loving classes, to the pandering impulses of the editors who inform them. For some reason I feel tempted to add to this the possible desire, on Graham-Dixon's part, to cultivate certain bombastic but admittedly fragile, blurb-dispensing egos by avoiding or else seconding their bugaboos. Graham-Dixon's condescending, un-hip articles about Warhol and Picabia are both suspect in this regard. He might subject himself, along with his readers and mentors, to some shocks of the new.

Blimey! is the perfect antidote: Matthew Collings' account of "The London Artworld from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst - From Bohemia to Britpop" - is funny, fragmented, and sharp. At various times, Collings has been an artist, art-magazine editor, BBC journalist, and teenage kidnappee - of "the Bohemian class, which is a branch of the middle class." He writes in a fat-free, deadpan, Warholian (The Philosophy of Andy Warhol from A to B and Back Again) style that allows him to tell us, without either being mean or clinically pedantic, everything we need to know about how the current young British art phenomenon got to be the carpetbagging caravan that it is.

He traces matters back to New York, circa 1980, and to a single early catalyst - that antithesis of typical Britishness, Julian Schnabel: "[He] was the first monster superbrat of the '80s art world, the model for Jeff Koons, and then, later, Damien Hirst." He pinpoints the actual London beginnings: "The first thing was a series of group shows held in warehouse spaces . . . The art wasn't all that different from anything that had been seen before. But the exhibitions were very professionally organized. Even though they were only put on by students, or recently graduated students, they had a bold European Kunsthalle look, or Soho in New York look, or pages of Flash Art or Artforum look."

He debunks some ideological trappings: "Part of the mythology of the young British artists is that they were oppressed by Thatcher's Britain and were rebels against the dominant culture. But sometimes people - such as Charles Saatchi - argue the opposite, that being enterprising and entrepreneurial and putting on luxury entertainment exhibitions in spaces that were previously warehouses but had become available because of the recession is not really revolutionary."

He exposes a profound and perhaps unlikely American influence: "The New York slacker artist Sean Landers, who does rambling semijokey confessional writings on canvas, is a main innovator of abjection. Some of his writings canvases were part of one of Saatchi's exhibition of his new acquisition of young American art. Everything else in the show was the usual fare. You recognized it was art, but there was nothing else interesting about it. But Sean Landers's writings are really worth reading because they're so funny. It just seems by the by that they're art."

It's all in that "by the by" Collings' crazy-like-a-fox quilt of episodes, sound bites, cameos and critical bullets (don't miss "Francis Bacon cliches," on page 38) is a subtle surgical instrument, and to this recent visitor to London, the guide.

Lisa Liebmann is a writer and critic who lives in New York.