Susan Yelavich is an authority on architecture and design, a curator of the National Design Museum and co-author of the catalogue, "Inside Design Now," which looks at cutting edge design from the perspective of 80 emerging and established designers. She was awarded the Rolland Rome Prize Fellowship in Design from the American Academy in Rome in 2003-04. Author of the book Contemporary World Interiors, she is the editor/author of Pentagram Profile, and author of Design for Life and The Edge of the Millennium: An International Critique of Architecture, Urban Planning, Product and Communication Design. She is a contributing editor of Patek Philippe magazine.

Roger Kimball is the Managing Editor of The New Criterion and is independently known as an author, co-author, or editor of numerous books.  Past titles include Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse, Experiments Against Reality: The Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age, and The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America. His latest book is The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art.

Laurie Fendrich, artist and Professor of Fine Arts at Hofstra University . She is a frequent contributor to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“At the end of the 20th century, plain old two-dimensional hand-made art offers one of the few ways for us to resist the pressures of mass consumer culture. But in order to have cultural impact, it is not enough for art to be simply "self-expression." Artists must use their intelligence and devote themselves to practice. They must respond specifically to a medium's possibilities and conventions, built up through history…”
In her essay “Sleeping Beauty”, she expresses despair about the future of beauty: “Before science progresses much further, it might be a good idea for it to weed out the human gene that longs for transcendent beauty.” Some of her essays and artwork can be found here:

http://www.people.hofstra.edu/faculty/laurie_fendrich/

Terry Teachout is the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the music critic of Commentary, but he writes about the other arts, too - books, ballet, painting and sculpture, film and TV, whatever happens to catch his eye or ear.

His personal website, “About Last Night”, is located at http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight or at www.terryteachout.com.

The late Phil Ochs was a singer/songwriter during the 1960's (variously categorized as ``topical'', ``protest'' and ``folk''). He was a friend of Bob Dylan.

Frank Whitford is art critic for the Sunday Times of London. Here is a sample of his writing, from a book review of ART SINCE 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism:

“Artists clamour for attention. So do some art historians. If the four who wrote this book were to spend more time looking than reading, their work might have been of more use. As it is, I fear that it will be read only by other teachers of art history and their hapless undergraduates.”

James W. McAllister is university lecturer in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Leiden . in Holland . He is the author of Beauty and Revolution in Science, published by Cornell University Press.

Kenneth Baker is art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.