For the New York Times’s senior art critic, 2010 has been about staying abreast of the gallery and museum scene’s postcrunch vagaries while keeping a calm eye on the latest developments in art itself. Smith has taken a pragmatic, hopeful approach to recession trends – giving a cautious welcome to the appointment of New York gallerist Jeffrey Deitch as the new director of crisis-ridden MOCA LA, for example. In terms of art criticism, among her standout commentaries was the assertion that painting isn’t dead; she has also been taking to task the ‘squeaky-clean, well-made, intellectually decorous’ products of fashionable postminimalism and Eurokunst ‘relational aesthetics’. Mildly conservative, pluralist and suspicious of hotheaded extremes, Smith remains the Big Apple’s bastion of responsible art criticism.