Kay Larson is an art critic, author, editor, and ⁠Buddhist practitioner. She currently practices in the the Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism.

Kay Larson has been an art critic and contributing editor (New York magazine 1980-1994); freelance critic and writer (New York Times, Artnews, Vogue, Architectural Digest, Deutsche Zeitung, many others); editor (Managing Editor, Curator: The Museum Journal, 2003-2014); and educator (Writing Tutor, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale on Hudson, New York, 2002-2010).

Her hundreds of articles and reviews — some four dozen for the New York Times alone — include “Jasper Johns: Trying to Escape from Himself,” Artnews, Oct. 1996; “[John] Cage Was Not Only All Ears, He Was All Eyes, Too,” New York Times, Feb. 4, 2001; “The Art Was Abstract, the Memories Are Concrete” (the founding of the Abstract Expressionist Club), New York Times, Dec. 15, 2002; and “Art: Karma? Top Floor, Next to Shoes” (the opening of the Rubin Museum of Art, New York), New York Times, July 25, 2004.

She taught an adjunct seminar in art history and contemporary criticism in the Department of Fine Arts, New York University, 1990-1997. In researching those lectures, she discovered that American composer John Cage had been a mentor in the 1950s for young visual artists who would shape the art of the 1960s. And as a practicing Buddhist, she realized that Cage’s attendance at classes taught by the important Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki in New York City in 1950-1958 had brought Cage to create pioneering new forms of music and performance, informed by Suzuki’s teachings on enlightenment.

She served on the Content Committee of Awake: Art, Buddhism, and the Dimensions of Consciousness, a colloquium at Green Gulch Zen Center in Marin County, California, 1999-2004, in which museum professionals, educators, academics, writers and artists gathered to consider the creative mind and its resonances with Buddhist teachings. A book of Awake White Papers, In the Space of Art: Buddha Mind and the Culture of Now (University of California Press, 2005), edited by Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob, contains her essay, “Shaping the Unbounded: One Life, One Art.”

In 2012, Penguin Press published her highly acclaimed biography of Cage and his influence: Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, about Cage’s contributions to world culture, and his precedent-shattering score, 4’33”, which embodies all his ideas in a single interval — a mere four-and-a-half minutes — of non-doing, non-intention, silence, and the music of the world. (Reviews at wheretheheartbeatsbook.com).