George Baker (art historian)


George Thomas Baker is an American art historian of modern and contemporary art. He is especially known for his writings on photography. He is a professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles and an editor of the journal October. Reviewing a book that Baker wrote on Dada, Merlin James wrote "What Baker really offers, perfectly reasonably, is high-end, post-modern theorising, with just a touch of unconventionality in honour of his subject’s way-outness."

Biography

Baker studied art history at Yale University and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, also studying at the Whitney Independent Study program in New York. While at Columbia his advisors were Rosalind E. Krauss and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. He edited an October Book on James Coleman, published in 2003, and has published The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris in 2007. He is also a critic of contemporary art, a contributor to Artforum magazine, he has written essays on the work of artist Paul Chan amongst others. In 2008 he participated in the conference Canvases and Careers Today at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, that was subsequently published as a book, delivering a paper called "Late Criticism".
In 2009, Baker led an attempt to save the fine arts library on the UCLA campus, launching a Facebook page and an online petition.