paintings and Paintings
There are paintings, and then there are paintings — I’ll capitalize the latter. Anyone who has Seen a Painting will feel the Truth in this distinction, and anyone who has felt the dissatisfaction of merely seeing a mere painting — and who hasn’t? — will either suspect that such a distinction exists or turn away from the work in front of them in search of meaning elsewhere.
And who can blame us for doing so? We’ve been taught that a Painting causes profound feelings (cue the cliché of crying in front of a Rothko). No wonder if we don’t immediately feel moved — and we usually don’t — we might worry that we’re missing something. So we may turn inward, retreating to subjective experience by treating the work as simply an occasion for associations and private pleasures. (“Well, I like it.”) Or we might turn outward in search of an objective authority — a wall plaque, or an art historian — to tell us what the work is “about” or what its value is, historically or monetarily. (“They say this work marked the start of Modernism.”) Or we may lose faith in Painting entirely, denigrating it as mere decoration, propaganda, or luxury good and calling for its critique, subversion, or end. All of these ways of turning away are complicated by our feeling that, nonetheless, this thing hanging on the wall before our eyes is, or ought to be, meaningful.
You likely think this distinction between Paintings and paintings is nonsense. But as thinkers and painters in the past have felt the need to distinguish between good and bad paintings, painting and decoration, art and mere objects, I — as a painter and a lover of Paintings, and thus someone invested in how we conceive of painting — feel this distinction has come to be necessary given our widespread aversion to artistic value judgments. [1]
The capital P feels jarring to a sensibility accustomed to the claim that all art is equally valuable, that its value lies in the beholder because artistic experience is subjective (as any high schooler is quick to preach). It conjures nightmares of elitist hierarchies; of calls for a return to the fetters of tradition; of Platonic forms in an ideal realm in relation to which the things we make are only imperfect shadows. Fear not. I don't mean to suggest that there exist determinate evaluative criteria according to which we can empirically classify a painted object as the uppercase or the lower. On the contrary, it is because there are no apparent criteria by which to judge and classify works, and because we are accustomed to turning to the market and art historical narratives instead of evaluating the work itself, that this distinction feels necessary — because, even without shared criteria for judging, we still feel that there must be more to painting than making visually pleasing objects or propositions about art; that there must be more to Seeing than private pleasure or illustrations of a (hi)story of art.
This essay is not a call for adherence to a certain style, subject matter, or process in painting. I hope, simply, to sketch what a Painting ought to be and a way of seeing (Seeing) in a time when, benumbed by visual stimuli and accustomed to a division of labor in which we readily submit to specialists, we presume that the artwork before our eyes is not enough — that our eyes are not enough; that there must be something behind or beyond the work in front of us that makes it intelligible, meaningful (the causal chain of historical events that led to its production or the social structures it is an illustration of; the artist’s intentions or our subjective associations). But we cannot See the Painting — the Painting doesn’t appear — if we look beyond or behind it, inward or outward. How an object appears — what an object is — depends on our orientation toward it. So, to get you to See what I mean by capitalizing the P, I begin with the basic orienting questions: Where are we? And how did we get here?
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A urinal, a stack of Brillo Boxes, a fabricated cube: The struggle between these nontraditional objects that newly claimed the title of “art” and the traditional medium-specific fine arts (painting, sculpture, and architecture) was fought in the twentieth century and, by the time my generation was born at the turn of the century, the once-revolutionary idea that anything can be art had become convention. Raised firmly within this new paradigm, we learned about this revolution second-hand — not through any real regulatory pressures of what would or wouldn’t be accepted as art, but from stories told by texts and teachers who, remembering (or imagining) their own struggles, behaved as if there continued to be a “tradition” that actively arbitrated what could be art. Before we were even in art school, art institutions and the market had shown themselves eager to embrace nontraditional artworks, including so-called conceptual art and institutional critique. But our education lagged behind, still centered around “subverting the tradition” and “challenging convention” — around being revolutionary, new. Instead of developing a familiarity with materials and techniques (or even a love for particular artworks), we learned the jargon of revolution. But the traditional medium-specific distinctions between painting, sculpture, and architecture, which had regulated artistic production for centuries in the West and which had excluded anything that didn’t fit these categories, had already been overthrown. Our revolt was empty. We were free, in a way, but didn’t know what to do with this freedom. And having only learned a critical attitude toward art and a distrust for earnestness, having never learned to See what makes art worthwhile — what makes good art Good — we found ourselves unable to begin to solve the problem: What to make — and how to make it — when anything can be art. That is, how to make something revolutionary when everything is permissible. [2]
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Western stories of art (which have spread (like a virus) through colonialism and global capitalism) incline toward plots of revolution, progress, the new. We are taught by textbooks and teachers, podcasts and wall plaques, biopics and bestsellers that art is the avant-garde, always in search of the new. They tell us that during the prehistory of this story, from the first stencil of a hand on a cave wall around 64,000 BCE to the quattrocento, “art” did not exist beyond some primordial creative impulse (an idyllic, likely imaginary state that some dream, in vain, of returning to). The human-made objects from these millennia that we now call art — paintings, sculptures, monuments — were not distinguished as art at all but were, rather, incorporated into daily life or ritual practice. The artisans who made these practical or cultic objects were largely anonymous. They learned their craft through apprenticeships to masters, and their production was highly regulated. Indeed, we’re told, the ancient etymological predecessors of the term (τέχνη in Ancient Greek and ars in Latin) denoted something closer to practical knowledge or craft.
This, they say, all changed at the start of the pre-modern chapter of art, supposedly beginning around 1500 somewhere in Europe, when painting, sculpture, and architecture were distinguished as the fine arts, together elevated to the level of a liberal art (alongside rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, history, and geometry) in contradistinction to skilled crafts (mere τέχνη or ars) like weaving and metalsmithing. From here on, artists as biographical figures, no longer anonymous, rose to prominence and began to be praised not for their craftsmanship but for their genius. It took a genius to achieve art’s goal: the imitation of nature, God’s creation, in a specific medium (the genius-painter is to painting as God is to nature; paint to the dust from which Adam was made). Progress was the motive of this story, with the work of each artist measured by how far it surpassed their master’s work, and approached (or even strove to surpass) their Creator’s. So Giotto went further than Cimabue, Leonardo further than Verrocchio, and Titian further than Bellini, each, in turn, developing new techniques for naturalistic representation, such as chiaroscuro and mathematical perspective.
This pre-modern chapter of art’s mimetic progress extends through the mid-nineteenth century. Then, whether due to the invention of photography, the strict regulation of the academy, or the French Revolution — different storytellers differ on the cause — the plot takes a turn. In this next chapter, titled “Modernism,” art, the storytellers say, became self-conscious and turned from a preoccupation with merely mimicking the appearance of nature to inquiring into the essence of its own nature: colored paste on a surface (painting), modulated forms in three dimensions (sculpture), and functional living space (architecture). From the flatness of Manet’s Olympia to the spiritual abstraction of Malevich’s White on White to Stella’s fully flat The Marriage of Reason and Squalor — from whence the caricature of the modernist painter, locked away in his studio, writing manifestos and believing that his inquiry into colored paste would lead to universal truth.
Then, somewhere around the 1960s, they tell us, a new chapter began: “Postmodernism” (where we allegedly are now). Things that looked unlike anything that had been called art in the past chapters — readymade objects that, far from fitting neatly into the categories of the fine arts, weren’t even made by an artist’s hand — began to claim the honorific title of “art.” The orientating narratives, the medium-specific plot arcs, of art’s progression toward the perfect representation of nature or self-consciousness of its own nature, fell apart. Though allegedly shocking in their time, the once-controversial medium-unspecific objects have now been canonized. Duchamp’s Fountain marks a chapter in art history books. A can of Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit No. 014 sits comfortably on a pedestal in MoMA. Cattelan’s Comedian, a banana duct-taped to the wall first shown in 2019, blew no minds, perhaps elicited a few ironic chuckles (tears) and eye rolls, and recently sold for $6.2 million (to a tech bro who *drumroll* ate the banana (but not the certificate that constitutes the work)). And, like that, the medium-specific criteria that identified art for the past six hundred years were overthrown. The stories of progress ended. Anything can be art. And now, a couple generations in, after the fanatic exploitation of novelty in the 60s and 70s that made everything into art that hadn't been before, we find ourselves disoriented. Plotless and pathless within a commodity culture that immediately metabolizes anything that promises a new direction, we, reared on the idea of art as a revolutionary force, aren’t sure where to turn to or from.
By retelling this story, I’m not arguing for its truth. On the contrary, I mean to delineate the deep confusion it has left in us about what it means to make art today. The historical conception of art we learned from it places an artwork’s value on its newness — the progress it made or the revolution it apparently caused in a narrative — a conception that has become cliché and debased into the unsatisfactory novelty of commodified experience. It’s this cliché that leaves art students with the empty idea of revolt that undercuts their faith in their chosen vocation, petering out in nostalgia or nihilism. While much-needed historical amendments to this story have been added — acknowledgment of the fine arts’ (painting’s, in particular) intimacy with early capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism; criticism of who gets written into art history; acknowledgment of art histories instead of a unified narrative — what we need is not simply a new story. A new story is meaningless unless we can engage with individual works meaningfully; the individual works are meaningless if we turn away from them toward a story that makes sense of them for us (wall plaques). Unless we center artistic experience around individual works (whatever the limits of each work may be: the borders of a canvas, a series, an installation), art will remain merely a story, a cliché, a fiction. Meaning arises through engagement with concrete particulars. And it is only on the level of meaning that newness can be realized.
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But I was talking about Paintings. That anything can be art I can’t dispute, nor do I want to. I’m not tempted to return to a fine arts system with determinate criteria for exclusion and evaluation (if such a thing ever existed). But it doesn’t follow that just because anything can be art that everything is art. And if we agree enough on the conclusion, if not the plot, of the above story of art — that art today is not regulated by medium-specificity — then it can only be an unconscious hangover from stories of the past to presume that anything that is made within those media-specific boundaries is a priori art. In short, just because something is painted, it is not given that it is art. All painted canvases are not Paintings.
A painted work is only a Painting if two criteria are fulfilled — neither of which determine the object’s appearance or subject matter (which is why a recent polemic [3] against identity politics in art is so utterly confused and, ultimately, revelatory of the fact that the author cares less about artworks than about a good party). Dictums about political content and good taste are equally irrelevant here. It is not what the painted work looks like at first glance or what it is “about” that determines whether it is a Painting. What matters is what it does, which can accommodate any political content or visual appearance. But for the Painting to do anything there must be reciprocal participation between the painted object, on the one hand, and the viewing subject, on the other.
As for the object, a Painting must risk its self-destruction in pursuit of its own perfection. It risks destroying itself by denying itself the comfort of clichés (beloved by convention and the market), pushing itself to the point where there’s no familiar way out. It pursues perfection (that unfashionable word) by trusting that new meaning can be made by destroying and transforming those inherited but empty clichés, from the unintelligibility of the necessary near-destruction of its becoming. It is on this scale — that of the individual work — that newness in art is possible; not on the scale of novel sensory experience (hedonism), nor on the scale of art historical revolutionary plots.
By surpassing the subjectivity of the maker (becoming more than merely private gush) and abstaining from the temptations of art historical clichés or market fashions, a Painting develops a logic of its own — that unfreezable, unsatisfactorily articulable logic of living things. (Here is where the miraculous has space to slip in. For Paintings, with their living logics, are, in a sense, miraculous. They, so to speak, have souls, and, in showing us their souls, reassure us of our own.) There are as many different logics as there are Paintings (as many souls as individual beings). This notion of Painting doesn’t categorically exclude any style, subject matter, technique, size, color scheme, material, etc. I’m not even sure that it requires that a Painting be made of paint.
A Painting is neither nostalgic (yearning for an idealized, imaginary past) nor nihilistic (despairing at the hopelessness of making meaning in the present). Nostalgic paintings, seeking safety in clichés, fail to risk their own destruction. They can be of any style or subject matter, but the prevailing flavor today tends toward the pretty pleasure of superficial references to art historical tropes, usually painted in faded sepia- or flesh-toned palettes of faded photographs. The tradwives of paintings, they are veiled and indeterminate in a kind of erotica-of-the- unattainable, suggesting that meaning-making is a thing of the past. Nihilistic paintings also preclude the possibility of meaning-making, but because they bank on their own failure, preemptively destroying the possibility of meaning by shirking the responsibility of making it. Nostalgic and nihilistic paintings are made by artists who, discouraged by the inefficacy of their revolt against the system (having lost their faith in Painting), ironically retreat to making paintings, the most saleable of the arts. Nostalgia and nihilism are two sides of the same coin minted by an orientation toward art grounded (or ungrounded) in empty revolt. Teaching that art’s newness is of a political or historical scale within a system that co-opts such narratives (because we as consumers gobble them up) can only cause despair at the seeming impossibility of making anything new. But this is no reason to retreat to making private gush. A Painting is its logic objectified, framed for our perception and intelligible in its own terms, which we, as perceivers, have to discover to See it.
Which is why a painted object is only a Painting if it is Seen — if we subjects (makers and viewers) surrender ourselves to its logic. We, of course, see through our subjectivities. But Seeing requires the subordination of our mere pleasures and associations to the object and the resulting feeling, grounded in the work itself, that what we See is actually there; that our experience of the work isn’t merely subjective. To See is to claim universality (a kind of objectivity) for one’s subjective experience, knowing full well that others will disagree. It requires the conviction, acquired only by long looking, that, if we looked together, I could get you to See what I do. And the worry that I may be wrong. For whether or not something is a Painting can’t be proven — there is no expert, no final judge, because both objects and subjects change across time and place. But they change less than we are accustomed to saying they do (convention may run as deep as nature), and, even if they do change, all we have is now and here. [4]
By functioning as a concrete object, existing in a concrete place at a specific time, where individual viewers with different perspectives can work to See it together, a Painting occasions experiential reassurance that we can share a world. And by creating its own logic from the elements of cliché conventions, a Painting affirms the possibility that our circumstances can change toward harmony, even if the harmony is not immediately effective in the empirical world.
Seeing takes more time than we customarily give to (p/P)aintings. We (accustomed to scrolling through images) are too quick to look away, averse to effortful engagement (Seeing) or worried that we don’t know enough to “get it.” But anyone can See a Painting. To See a Painting is to overcome the clichés through which we usually see, to perceive something in its particularity, the way it wants to be, without applying concepts external to it but rather discovering those immanent to it. It is even possible to See the Painting in the unsuccessful painting: the picture of perfection it points toward and failed to attain. [5]
The distinction between paintings and Paintings does not map onto a distinction between painters and Painters (failures and geniuses). There are works by Rothko that are Paintings (No. 13 (Red, White on Yellow)) and those that are just paintings (as I suspect No. 5/No. 22 to be). It’s not impossible that a painter only ever makes one Painting, nor that a Painting is made by someone who has never painted before. Clichés run deep, and even the works made by biographical figures whom we are taught to consider great often fail to overcome them. To overcome cliché — to do something new — each Painting must construct itself from the stories that its painter was taught, from their memories and associations, transforming them rather than merely arranging them. It must build its own being, its own tradition, its own world, by defining its own terms. There are as many art (hi)stories as there are Paintings. No neatly chaptered story with nice plot arcs and heroes can tell a painter where to go or tell a viewer how to understand a work.
Faith in Painting — that which allows the leaps of risk-taking and promises an approach to perfection — requires an overcoming of both the cliché stories of art with their revolutionary cries for the new and the market pressures that mistake novel experience for newness. A Painting, regardless of whether it was made five hundred years ago or yesterday, can be new (to one who tries to See it) by virtue of its concrete particularity: the degree to which it creates its own laws that define itself. This is a humble sort of newness. It will not change the course of history or alter the functioning of institutions that apply pressures to artistic production. But it is a tangible newness available to the subject who works to See it, a glimpse of the possibility of coherence in a seemingly broken world.
Notes
1. This felt need for some kind of evaluative standard or method in art has been expressed by critics in recent years, most notably (and more articulately) Sean Tatol in his 2023 essay “Negative Criticism: A Sentimental Education” and, more recently (and inarticulately), Dean Kissick’s “The Painted Protest” from November 2024. I will have to deal with the implications of Paintings on criticism another time, though I’ll make a sketch in the fifth footnote. For now, while I find both Tatol and Kissick misguided because they seem to be more concerned with curatorial decisions and social scenes than with artworks, their polemics point to a widespread dissatisfaction with regards to the quality (tricky word) of work produced now and how we engage with it. It’s noteworthy that, although both articles received backlash, dissenting voices generally did not disagree with the claim that there’s a glut of mediocre work, but rather over what ought to be valued in art.
2. Our uncertainty regarding how to deal with this inherited artistic freedom won in a struggle we didn’t fight is analogous to similar confusions around freedoms of religion, sex, and race. In the face of “freedom” — in the discovery that freedom from oppression doesn’t guarantee a sense of meaning (it is rather what one does with that freedom) it can be tempting to turn away from the present and become nostalgic for institutions that seem to have given meaning in the past (institutionalized religion, traditional family roles, nationalism) or nihilistic about change. These trends are alarming because these freedoms we have so recently gained are partial and precarious. We forget all too easily that the freedoms we have inherited aren’t given. We also forget that freedom poses new problems; namely, what to do with it.
3. Dean Kissik’s “The Painted Protest”
4. I take Kant’s aesthetic judgments of beauty (“This is beautiful”) as the template for my judgments of Painting (“This is a Painting”). For Kant, there is something peculiar about judgments of beauty: They, like all aesthetic judgments, are based on an individual’s subjective experience of pleasure; and yet, when we make them we act as if what we judge to be beautiful ought to be judged beautiful by everyone. This entails positing that there is a shared human sense that makes possible universal accord, a sensus communis. But the existence of this sensus communis can’t be empirically proven — we, in actuality, don’t agree in our judgments of beauty — but its existence must be presupposed if it is possible to communicate our subjective feelings to one another. It is this possibility — this hope of being in accord with each other and the world — that beauty experientially reassures us of. Writing centuries later, Stanley Cavell and Thierry de Duve take the indeterminacy of art, and the consequent controversies regarding what art is, what we value in art and whom art is for, to be central to the experience of art from the 1960s onward. For both thinkers, “art” remains an indeterminate concept, so that, lacking criteria to appeal to, the classification of something as art can’t come prior to its evaluation. We can’t empirically prove that something is a work of art. We can only, based on a subjective feeling or conviction, judge something to be art and claim it to be so. This art-judgment is an aesthetic judgment similar in structure to Kant’s judgment of beauty: a judgment based on a subjective feeling that claims universality on non-conceptual grounds. Both Cavell and de Duve emphasize the claim involved in the art-judgment’s appeal to universality and posit a transcendental grounding of such judgments: if we each can validly claim universality for our subjective feeling that something is art, then we must have basic human faculties in common that make possible the communication of subjective feelings that underlie this universally valid judgment. This means that everyone’s art-judgment is valid, even though we do not, empirically, all agree. But to judge something is art, we have to feel first-hand that it is art; feel the “art-feeling” in the same way we feel beauty (“Now, that’s art!”). No authority can tell us that something is or isn’t art. Art is special because our claim that something is art is a subjective claim of universality, a type of intersubjective objectivity. In Seeing the Painting, we are experientially reassured — convinced — that it is possible for the other to See it too (“It’s right before your eyes!”). But if they don’t See it, and if we want to share a world with them, we have to take on the burden of expressing what we See, of orienting them in a direction so we can See it together.
5. A type of criticism — perhaps the only productive type of criticism — would take this as its method: try to See what a particular work is trying to do according to the work’s own standards (the logical outcome of its, perhaps underdeveloped, logic), then show how it achieves or falls short in its own terms. This nominalistic approach, which treats each work as its own intelligible structure (as opposed to assuming a priori that the exhibition, the artist’s ouvre, or the time period is the relevant unit of intelligibility) would help to avoid the utter uninterestingness of most criticism, which tends either toward judgments based on subjective “like”/“dislike” statements (Yelp reviews) or judgments based on how a work fits into objective historical narratives (praising works as cutting-edge or denigrating works as reactionary) both of which turn away from the particular logic of the work. Such criticism resorts to clichés like “X’s work [enter verb here (explores, probes, criticizes, questions, investigates, etc.)] [enter general idea here (convention, tradition, history, identity, formal concerns, materiality, etc.)]” with no grounding in the individual work (logic) — and, in that sense, is not critical at all.
