Shirley Kaneda's Smooth Abrasion is the sole representative of the abstract art that Carrier (Case Western Reserve U./Cleveland Institute of Art) discusses in this study of visual art via an intellectual history of art critic Krauss. As a philosopher-art critic, the author focuses on her books and journal October rather than on her personal life in arguing that she is our greatest philosophical art critic. After sketching the rise of philosophical art criticism, he traces modern art movements in tandem with phases of Krauss' (and other major) critical responses on Abstract Expressionism's formalism, the "structuralist adventure," and her deconstruction of structuralism in The originality of the avant-garde and other modernist myths (1985). Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)