ITHACA, N.Y. -- Art critic and historian Donald Kuspit will give a free and public lecture at Cornell University on Tuesday, April 23, titled "Dialectics of Decadence: The Weight of History on Contemporary Art" at 5:15 p.m. in Room 115 of Tjaden Hall.

Kuspit, a professor of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, lends his editorial expertise to several prominent journals, including Art Criticism, Artforum, New Art Examiner, Sculpture and Centennial Review.

"Don Kuspit is one of the best known and most highly regarded critics in the world," said Victor Kord, Cornell art professor. He said Kuspit is particularly known for his work on the currently popular movement of neo-expressionism, which was inspired by the emotionally charged German expressionism of the 1920s and 1930s.

In developing his theories, Kuspit has borrowed heavily from the fields of philosophy and psychoanalysis. He holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Columbia University, as well as master's and doctoral degrees in philosophy from Yale University and the University of Frankfurt in Germany, respectively, and master's and doctoral degrees in art history from Pennsylvania State University and the University of Michigan, respectively.

Since obtaining those degrees, he has taught in both philosophy and art history at several institutions, including Penn State and SUNY Stony Brook, where he chaired the art history department for four years and developed its first graduate program in art history and criticism. Kuspit also has been trained at the Psychoanalytic Institute of the New York University Medical Center, where he has been a clinical lecturer in psychiatry.

His latest book, co-authored by Lynn Gamwell and just published by Cornell University Press, is Health and Happiness in Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Art; about to be published is another work, Idiosyncratic Identities: Artists at the End of the Avant-Garde.

Kuspit has received a Fulbright Lectureship in Philosophy and American Studies, Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism and, most recently, an honorary doctorate from the San Francisco Institute of Art.