EP34: Selected Essays, 1973-2023, is Walter Robinson’s only book of essays. That it took this long for such a publication by such a formidable writer of his epoch to appear is in itself astonishing. The book contains essays on Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner, Donald Judd, Douglas Heubler, David Salle, Duncan Hannah, Kiki Smith, Mike Bidlo, Luis Frangella, Keiko Bonk, Group Material, John Ahearn, Martin Wong, Renoir, John Coplans, Julian Schnabel, Nam June Paik, Keith Sonnier, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Laurie Simmons, Robert Longo, Jeff Koons, Isa Genzken, Yoko Ono, Marilyn Minter,  Charles Clough and Jean-Michel Basquiat, among others, and, of course, about himself, both as an artist and a critic, decidedly his least favorite subject. Controversial texts include: “Junk Politics,” “The Quest for Failure,” “Clueless: The Crisis of Criticism,” “Art Under Control in North Korea,” “What Artists Really Think of Studio Visits,” “The Hate Esthetic,” “I Used to Paint Girls, Now I Paint Cheeseburgers,” “Zombie Formalism,” “Gay and God: The Perverse Art of Robert Gober,” “Does the New Whitney Hate America?” “Don’t Make a Scene,” and several previously unpublished texts.

Walter Robinson was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1950. He grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and moved to New York City to attend Columbia University, graduating in 1972. In 1973, he co-founded with Joshua Cohn and Edit DeAk the modest but legendary Art-Rite magazine, publishing many of the most important artists of the 1960s and ’70s. In 1978, he became a Contributing Editor at Art in America. He joined the artist collective, COLAB, in 1980, and was included in such important and infamous exhibitions as The Times Square Show and The Real Estate Show, and had his first one person show at Metro Pictures in 1982. He became the Art Editor of the East Village Eye from 1983 to 1985, worked as an editor at Art in America in the 1980s and ’90s, and in 1996 founded Artnet. He had a major museum retrospective, Walter Robinson: Paintings and Other Indulgences, at the University Galleries of Illinois State University, in 2014. The monograph, A Kiss Before Dying: Walter Robinson – A Painter of Pictures and Arbiter of Critical Pleasures, by Richard Milazzo, was published in 2020.