ANN ARBOR—”There can be great paintings of various types, but some works are better than other works. The crucial thing, always, is, ‘What makes it a good painting?'” says Michael Fried, the Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and director of the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University.

Fried, speaking on “Roger Fry’s Formalism,” will explore the philosophy of critical art at 4 p.m. on Nov. 2, during the two-day Tanner Lecture on Human Values, hosted by the University of Michigan’s Department of Philosophy. The lecture will be held in Auditorium A, Angell Hall. The Nov 3 symposium will begin at 9:30 a.m. in the Vandenberg Room, Michigan League.

“I feel that most people aren’t interested in art at all, in a demanding sense,” says Fried. “The idea of caring whether something is good, for how it works, the kind of involvement that art characteristically demands and rewards, has really gone out.” Fried sees the public’s loss of a critical artistic eye as unfortunate, and desires to see the rebirth of an artistic appreciation of painting, poetry, music and film.

An art critic, Fried has written several books including “Courbet’s Realism,” “Manet’s Modernism,” “Art and Objecthood,” and “Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot.”

Other speakers at the symposium will include Thomas Crow, director, the Getty Research Institute; Toril Moi, the James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies, Duke University; and Richard Moran, professor of philosophy, Harvard University.

Each year the Tanner Lecture travels from university to university and is endowed by several host universities consisting of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, University of California-Berkeley, University of Utah (where Obert Tanner, the lectures’ namesake, taught philosophy for many years), and U-M. John Rawls, Toni Morrison, Richard Rorty, Amos Oz, and Carol Gilligan are past Tanner Lecturers.

Additional information about Obert Tanner and the Tanner Lectures is available at http://www.hum.utah.edu/humcntr/. More about the U-M Department of Philosophy can be found at http://www.lsa.umich.edu/philosophy/.

Humanities CenterDepartment of PhilosophyCourbet’s RealismThomas CrowObert Tannerhttp://www.hum.utah.edu/humcntr/