Michael Martin Fried (April 12, 1939, New York) is an American modernist art critic and historian. He studied at Princeton and Harvard universities; then, in England, notably at Merton College in Oxford. He is Professor Emeritus J.R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and Art History at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Fried's contribution to art historical discourse involved the debate about the origins and development of modernism. Along with Fried, the interlocutors in this debate include other theorists and critics such as Clement Greenberg, T. J. Clark, and Rosalind E. Krauss.