If you’re an art critic, it helps to feel that something is at stake in what you’re writing about. It sharpens the pencil, so to speak. When reading the criticism of Ben Davis, the feeling of stakes is ever-present—the sense that art and its aims, concerns, and debates are not frivolous but core, nested within the broader sweep of human affairs like a thinking heart. This is why for a long time I’ve considered Ben to be the best, most consistently interesting art critic anywhere. I’ve also ...