Brian O'Doherty - Career

Career

For many years, O'Doherty was an influential member of the senior staff of the National Endowment for the Arts, first as director of the Visual Arts Program, and subsequently as director of the Media Arts Program, where he was responsible for the creation of such major public television series as American Masters and Great Performances. He is the author of numerous works of art criticism, including his book American Masters and the influential book Inside the White Cube: Ideologies of the Gallery Space, in which he discusses and invents the term for the Contemporary Gallery Space. He has also written novels: The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P. (1992) and the 2000 Booker Prize-nominated The Deposition of Father McGreevey (1999).

On May 20, 2008, in recognition of the progress for peace in Ireland, O'Doherty ceremoniously buried his alter ego at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and resumed being called by his birth name.

In The modern art collection, Trinity College Dublin, David Scott writes that:

"Much influenced by Marcel Duchamp he is an essentially interrogative artist, constantly questioning artistic conventions and the assumptions on which we base our aesthetic judgements."