Craig Owens (critic)

Craig Owens (1950–1990) was an American post-modernist art critic,[1] gay activist[2] and feminist.

[4] He wrote many essays on such diverse topics as photography, feminism, gay politics, art in the marketplace, serial art, and psychoanalysis, as well as a number of seminal essays on individual contemporary individual artists, including Allan McCollum,[5] William Wegman, and Barbara Kruger.

According to his colleague Douglas Crimp, Owens's great interest in ballet was important to his critical work.

[6][7] According to the critic Thomas Lawson, Owens was "on the one hand... this very high-minded, very abstract thinker, but he also had this mischievous, playful side that was a little cruel, maybe.

[9] With reference to Walter Benjamin in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, he also links allegory with impermanence, the piling up of fragments and obsessional accumulation.