Michelle Marder Kamhi is an independent scholar and critic and co-editor of Aristos (an online review of the arts). She is the author of Who Says That’s Art? A Commonsense View of the Visual Arts—lauded by Kirkus Reviews as “forceful and persuasive.” Her new book, Bucking the Artworld Tide: Reflections on Art, Pseudo Art, Art Education & Theory, is slated for May 2020 publication.

Kamhi previously co-authored What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand (Open Court, 2000). That book dealt with all the major arts and was praised by the American Library Association's Choice magazine for its “well-documented . . . debunking of twentieth-century art . . . and art theory.” The Art Book (published by the British Association of Art Historians) called What Art Is a “balanced critical assessment of Rand’s idiosyncratic arguments.” The book was also lauded for its “breadth and depth” by the eminent cultural historian Jacques Barzun.

After graduating from Barnard College, Kamhi earned an M.A. in Art History at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Before joining Aristos in 1984, she had been an editor at Columbia University Press--where she worked on titles in its distinguished Records of Civilization series--and was active as a freelance writer and editor.

Kamhi is a member of the American Society for Aesthetics, the National Art Education Association, the National Association of Scholars, and AICA-USA (the International Association of Art Critics – United States). Articles by her have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Art Education, Arts Education Policy Review, and Epoch Times, among other publications.