Over the last several decades, Irving Sandler has proven himself one of the most important writers on the the New York art scene. His first book, The Triumph of American Painting (1970), remains on of the most coherent interpretations of Abstract Expressionism ever published.

In The New York School (1978), American Art of the 1960s (1988) and Art of the Postmodern Era (1996), Sandler continued to bring both an enthusiast’s passion and a scholar’s analytical skills to the history of the artists among whom he worked.

In fact, this is his unique status: Since the very early days of Abstract Expressionism, he has not only worked as a jobbing critic, but kept close company with artists, maintained detailed records of his experiences and made these the basis of his publications.

He calls this technique “on-the-spot history,” and this phrase provides the subtitle of his new collection of essays, From Avant-Garde to Pluralism, just published by Hard Press Editions.

He spoke to ArtInfo in his Manhattan apartment, surrounded by his remarkable art collection, work by the artists whom he numbers among his “closest friends”: Alex Katz, Al Held and Philip Pearlstein, and also pieces by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Louise Nevelson, Laurie Anderson, Gregory Crewdson, Eric Fischl and many others.

Irving, one of the more refreshing things that the new book reminds me of is that you always knew your place, as it were. You never imagined that what you were doing was more important than the art you were writing about.

It wasn’t. How could it be?

Yes, but a lot of writers and critics have seen things rather differently.

There’s a kind of arrogance in critics that I have never had any use for. It really came in at two times. It came in with the younger academic critics of the sixties, the people in Clement Greenbergs ambit. Greenberg himself thought that artists were dumb, and he thought he was smarter. And then later with the art theoreticians picking up from Roland Barthes, the artist disappears and the text becomes important, and the interpreter of the text literally becomes the artist.

Greenberg clearly imagined that his role was to show artists what to do.

There is also an assumption—I think it comes from Jackson Pollock, and even there it’s unfair—that the artist is a kind of inspired idiot. That is absolutely false. I have never met a significant dumb artist; and I have never met an artist who couldn’t at least tell you what they were about and also tell you why they weren’t about something else.

I believe that a critic should take into consideration an artist’s intention, and indeed articulate it. That’s the starting point and then you move on from there. Of course, that was the one thing that people like Clement Greenberg thought was utterly beside the point of criticism.

It really seems inconceivable nowadays that a critic could wield the sort of influence that he aspired to in the ’50s and ’60s. Or that anyone would imagine that there was only one way to make art. Artists can do anything now.

It’s a situation of pluralism.

But, for a lot of the time that you’ve written about, there were what were called “movements,” or at least competing directions or trends. When do you think that situation changed?

It ran out about 1970. The situation of criticism was very different before then. We always had an edge to work against. Polemically we were either for or against something. We had Abstract Expressionism, then that was replaced by Pop Art, then Minimalist Abstraction, and then by ’67, Post-Minimalism.

[Before 1970,] there were artists working in a related direction who claimed the most art world attention—as the Abstract Expressionists did, and the Pop artists did, and the Minimalists did. So we didn’t have to worry about all sorts of other things that were happening all over the place, all of these things happening in every which direction, because art world attention was on Pop or Minimalism.

But when that splays out, as it did after 1970, the problem for criticism becomes: If anything goes, what counts? So the situation of criticism really is in crisis, compared to the kind of say that critics had in the 1960s.

Who do you think has that say now? Who decides what’s important?

If you think of what creates the art world consensus, you have certain artists, certain dealers, certain collectors, certain art editors and art critics, a few art historians, and certain museum directors, curators, and trustees. We tend to know one another, we tend to network. That’s the art establishment.

Within that establishment, taste-making power shifts, so in the 195os taste-making powers were really held by certain really important artists. Their word counted. In the ’60s that shifted to critics, particularly the Artforum critics. And then in the ’70s, it began to shift over to dealers and finally collectors.

There was a moment in the ’80s, maybe longer than a moment, when art theoreticians really began to command interest, but now it’s really the market. I think that Charles Saatchi has been far more important than Rosalind Krauss.

So what has that done to the work? Do you find the art scene now as stimulating as you ever did?

Yes. Yes. I track it very closely. I get to Chelsea one or twice a week, or once to Chelsea, once to 57th Street, and once to what’s left of SoHo. Again it’s a matter of attitude.

I can’t believe that art just stopped short at any one point, as pretty much all of my peers did—whether it was Harold Rosenberg cutting it off with Abstract Expressionism, or Clement Greenberg cutting it off with color-field abstraction. I can’t believe that there aren’t young artists who are doing marvelous work; of course there are.