Michael Fried is a professor of humanities and the history of art at Johns Hopkins University, He's best known as a singularly influential art critic and historian, especially for his controversial 1967 Artforum essay, "Art and Objecthood;" and for his trilogy tracing the genealogy of modern art back through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Absorption and Theatricality (1980); Courbet's Realism (1990); and Manet's Modernism (1996), He's also written prolifically on photography, literature, and is a poet.