Michael Fried is an influential Modernist art critic and historian. He is currently the J.R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and Art History at Johns Hopkins University, United States.

Fried was involved in a circle of art critics including Clement Greenberg, Ken Moffett, and Rosalind Krauss. Since the early 1970s, he has also been close to philosopher Stanley Cavell. In his essay, Art and Objecthood, published in 1967, he suggested that Minimalism had betrayed Modernism's exploration of the medium by making claims that are unsubstantiated by the actual experience of the viewer. Minimalism being more focused on the "theatricality" rather than the art object thus blurs the distinction between art and non-art. Art and Objecthood remains among the most important pieces on 20th century American art, and is furiously debated to this day.

In more recent years, Fried has written several long and complex histories of modern art, most famously on Édouard Manet, Gustave Courbet, and painting in the late 18th century.

• Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot
• Manet's Modernism
• Courbet's Realism
• Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin
• Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane

Fried is also a poet, having written The Next Bend in the Road and To the Center of the Earth.

Year of birth missing | American art critics | Johns Hopkins University faculty | Modernism