Whitford Deconstructed

Re “Art Experts, Deconstructed,” Commentary, April 5: Frank Whitford needs to tell us just where Jacques Derrida “claims to know more about a piece of writing than the author did.” But he can’t; there is no such passage.

An ominous contempt for truth oozes from the over-baked rhetoric of Whitford’s article.

One suspects he would like to replace the dominance of “theory” in art history with the dominance of Frank Whitford.

I’m sorry, but we’ll have to do better than that.

John McCumber

UCLA Professor of Germanic Languages