"astute essay" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It typically refers to an essay or piece of writing that is intellectually clever, insightful, and perceptive. Example: The astute essay on political corruption opened the reader's eyes to the intricate web of deceit and manipulation within the government.
Harvey Araton's astute essay about the senior citizens Jack McKeon, 75, and Joe Paterno, almost 79, ("A Touch of Gray Can Revitalize a Troubled Team," Nov. 22) should be inspiration to all of us old-timers.
Like certain other young American artists — Ms. Cornell writes about them in her astute essay — Ms. Roysdon makes art and activism one thing: you make history by living it, saying it, giving it form.
LARS TRODSON Block Island, R.I., Sept. 29, 2013 To the Editor: Jonathan Mahler, in his astute essay about the growing irrelevance of baseball in America, asserts that football is able to capture the public's excitement because "it's louder, faster and more violent... better in tune with our cultural moment".
One of his most astute essays, "The Power of the Powerless," was written to illustrate the unrelenting struggle to attain dignity.
The film is called "Two Women in Combat," and Sabine Breitwieser, one of the curators of the MOMA show, interprets its significance in her astute catalogue essay.
Rothkopf unwittingly suggests as much when he writes, in his otherwise astute catalogue essay, that "Koons is not just a child of our time but an active agent of it, one who has formed an extreme aesthetic position in concert with an admittedly problematic but also promising epoch".
In her brief, astute catalog essay E. Carmen Ramos, an assistant curator at the Newark Museum, makes the wry point that "hyphenated institutions" like El Museo "were global — defined then as bicultural, Nuyorican, Chicano, etc., and now as multicultural, biracial, diasporic, or transnational — before global was in vogue".
His astute overview, "The Art of the Personal Essay," (Anchor, 1995) crowns Seneca the Younger (c. A.D. 3-65) as personal essay originator.
Vidal is an astute literary observer, and I particularly enjoyed his essays on Mark Twain and Sinclair Lewis.
David Foster Wallace, in his great essay "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart," collected in "Consider the Lobster," provides the most astute take I've read on the genre, what he calls the "the sports-star-'with'-somebody autobiography".
There are also moments when you sense an astute awareness of other art, including possibly Max Ernst (whose work Mr. Storr reproduces in his catalog essay), Color Field painting and Pop Art, evident in a bright postcardlike Alpine vista.
