After studying
history of art at the
University of Manchester, Januszczak became an art critic, and then books editor, of
The Guardian. In 1989, he was appointed head of arts at
Channel 4 television. In the seven years he spent there he televised the
Turner Prize for the first time and the
Glastonbury Festival. He started the series ''J'Accuse
, commissioned a final interview in 1994 with the playwright Dennis Potter by Melvyn Bragg, and started the music series The White Room''. In 1992, he became art critic for
The Sunday Times. He has been voted Critic of the Year twice by the
Press Association. In 1997, he took part in a Channel 4 discussion called
The Death of Painting, occasioned by the absence of painters from that year's Turner Prize. The programme was made famous when an apparently drunk
Tracey Emin swore at the other participants and left after ten minutes. In 2002, when insurance broker and art collector
Ivan Massow lashed out at
conceptual art in general and said that Emin could not "think her way out of a paper bag", Januszczak observed in a letter to
The Independent that "thinking" would not be very helpful in those circumstances. In 2004, he differed from most critics in his defence of the art of
Stella Vine, singling her out for praise in his otherwise hostile review of the
Saatchi Gallery's
New Blood show ("although I didn't much want to like Vine's contribution, I found I did. It had something."), and continuing to champion her, seeing "a combination of empathy and cynicism that can be startling." Later that year, he took part in a Christmas special critics edition of the television quiz show
University Challenge. Reviewing the exhibition
Americans in Paris at London's
National Gallery in 2006, he described
James McNeill Whistler's
Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl as "a clumsy bit of cake-making with thick smudges of white rubbed into the canvas in coarse, dry skid marks". "Even Whistler's renowned mother manages here to underwhelm", he said. Hoaxed by artist
Jamie Shovlin, Januszczak later that year "revealed" in his paper how the 1970s
glam rock band
Lustfaust had "cocked a notorious snook at the music industry in the late 1970s by giving away their music on blank cassettes and getting their fans to design their own covers". The band had never existed outside Shovlin's fiction. Januszczak replied that Shovlin should be applauded for his capacity to remind us of the crucial place of the artist in today's society as he made clear that "Reality simply cannot be trusted any more". In October 2008, Januszczak co-curated a show at the
British Museum called
Statuephilia, in which modern sculptures by six artists were shown next to their more ancient counterparts. The show was inspired during his creation of the series
The Sculpture Diaries, a three-part series on sculpture around the world, which was first aired on 31 August 2008 on Channel 4. One of the original presenters of
The Late Show on
BBC 2, Januszczak has made many appearances on television, presenting programmes on the history of art, and appearing on
The Culture Show and
Newsnight Review. Beginning on 27 November 2012, he presented a four-part series
The Dark Ages: An Age of Light about the art and architecture of the
Dark Ages on
BBC Four. In October 2019, he directed and narrated
Handmade in Bolton on BBC Four, a short documentary series featuring
Shaun Greenhalgh and fronted by
Janina Ramirez. He produces content for the art channel Perspective, part of the Little Dot Studios Network (
All3Media) and for Sky Arts. ==Films==