If you’re a magazine writer, you’re not eligible for the Pulitzers, which are strictly a newspaper prize. (Except obviously for books, plays and music.) So we magazine types regard them much the way that cats must look upon the Westminster Dog Show — nice show, other species. All the same I was gratified that this year the prize for criticism went to an art critic, Holland Cotter, who gives lefty and multi-culti cred to the arts reviewing in The New York Times. More than that, Cotter is the first full time art critic to win since Emily Genauer of the Long Island daily Newsday won in 1974. (Last year’s winner, Mark Feeney of The Boston Globe, is an multi-purpose film/art/photo guy.)
And the prize that went to Cotter almost went yet again to Inga Saffron, architecture critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer, now a three-time runner up. (Their bad. As they say in World War II fighter pilot movies — “We read you, Inga.”) As I know very well, the last architecture critic to get the Pulitzer was Blair Kamin of The Chicago Tribune in 1999. Did I mention that he managed to win it the first week that he and I began a three-person post-grad fellowship program at the University of Chicago?
I was not jealous. Not a bit. Not even a little.
Honest.