Perseity (formerly, briefly, Ridge Art Review) is an art / criticism magazine founded on the conviction that individual artworks are the basic unit of meaning in art analysis, that perception is an activity and takes work, hence that writing criticism is its own creative work.

Image-Object
CrossLypka at Bureau

May 23, 2026 | by Ian Myers

CrossLypka, bbbb, 2026, Glazed ceramic, 20 × 64 × 7 in

I
In Sports, the exhibition at Bureau by Oakland-based duo CrossLypka, the first work to the right when you walk in is made up of four, nearly identical, nearly symmetrical vertical ceramic panels aligned horizontally. It is titled bbbb, so maybe each is just a letter, but I don’t actually think that matters so much. These panels are closest together at the two stumpy forms that run horizontally through their center; each seeming like the approximate size and shape of the tube of clay emitted directly from a small pugmill, then blended into the more rigid panel. Each glaze-image, if we can call it that, is made up of six areas of colored glaze on a black ground: starting from the top, beige, lime green, and a smaller portion of blue. The effect of the glaze running down the surface creates a kind of cross shape in the center, as if that is its subject, but I don’t think that matters much either.The looseness of any form here, along with each panel's near-symmetry, allows them to be read as a kind of Rorschach test. It could be a kind of hook, leading a viewer by the nose to recognize this poster-child for a limited subjectivity, as if it is an antidote to the way we are taught to interact with images. After all, we are inundated with images every second of every day, and each successive image teaches us to be even more brief with the next, while we understand that a Rorschach test is, at the very least, different from that. But material choices deepen what would otherwise be a kind of visual pun about looking. Since each glaze-image is painted or poured, they’re more like Rauschenberg’s matching abstractions, close to sameness but never actually the same, at once doing away with and reinforcing the painterly sentiment of a kind of uniqueness in abstraction. Either way, variation of the hand or the unexpected occurring in the firing also seems to live behind a veil of crackle. This is especially noticeable in bbbb, where four panels are coated in a raku-like, fractured glaze; allowing that, in effect, any image that might have been recedes from us behind a screen of itself, a forever unreachable thing.This contrasts starkly with the fact that each of these four panels do nothing to obfuscate their materiality; they look heavy, not unlike the oil paintings done towards the end of the Renaissance and into the beginning of the Baroque on stone, like Titian’s Ecce Homo dragged over the mountains. And these objects do have a relationship with painting, even if only to combat it. Each panel in bbbb and indeed many of the other works in the room seem to challenge the obvious limitations of a flat plane—draping it, folding it, compressing it with a two-by-four—and this confrontation carries much of the work of the glaze-image. By this I mean that the otherwise flat plane of bbbb is interrupted by how it drapes on the pugmill forms running through their center, and by the torn edge separating each panel. The lump of the pugmill form creates a topography that lets the glaze run away from this equator, and lends itself to some kind of expansion or frozen mitosis.The rigid, foundational panels of bbbb encourage this comparison with painting. But again material interferes. The edges are coated about halfway down by the gritty silica sand or alumina or whatever else was used to keep the glaze from adhering to kiln shelves. A firing cone, used to gauge the temperature of the kiln, has adhered itself to the upper right edge of the rightmost panel, stark white against the black glaze.This being the case, it’s fair to ask why bother comparing these to painting at all? On the one hand, it is certainly my own biases about why clay can be so compelling; it is as if it is a kind of non-Neutonian fluid, at least for a time, or rather a fat, gritty, beige paint that is, in a way, its own support. On the other hand is the nature of working in ceramics; namely, the distinct stages involved in its facture.There is a kind of distancing that happens when a clay form is left to dry. It shrinks a little as it loses its water content and becomes brittle. It is distanced further after the first firing, where it’s transformed into ceramic and shrinks again. And then glazing, which only yields so many clues about its future before firing once more, often at an even higher temperature, where chemical reactions create new colors and the run and drip of liquid glass make new forms; images dictated by heat as much as the hand. The painters I admire most often describe painting as a relationship between the painter, the act of painting, and, at least in the case of Guston, this “other third thing;” the unexpected amalgamation of disparate elements of a work, coming together to make a thing greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a romantic notion, and maybe for some, a tired one. But really it stands as a kind of justification for having made the thing at all: that something happened, and happened in a way which could not have been fully accounted for by a plan alone. It stands as a justification that this thing is more than an image— it is a site, whether for discovery, revelation, or, in the case of the duo CrossLypka, reciprocity.CrossLypka is composed of Tyler Cross and Kyle Lypka. The press release (one of the best I’ve read recently, by Theodora Walsh) describes the process: “each work is transformed by the artists’ respective touch.” And so this complicated relationship between maker and object is complicated further; Guston’s vague triad made real. I was reluctant, at first, to speculate about the logistical complications of this working arrangement. But how much richer these objects are for it. It’s a kind of call and response, between partner, kiln, and back again, enlivened by the unexpected, like a game of telephone, wherein all participants, whether person, object, or oven, can act in bad-faith, imbue new meaning, add and take away, and make anew. “I guess the question we are asking,” states Lypka in the press release, “is if it’s possible to share intuition with another person. And the answer is sort of, but never completely.”II
I’ve been struggling to write about this show. These things are hard to write about. The objects, I mean. Every time I’ve started, I found myself building with one hand while unraveling with the other. So to begin the unraveling: it doesn’t matter whether anyone would look at these things as paintings. These image-objects, as I’ve come to think of them, offer more than enough to look at, think about, and scrutinize than could be gained by being tethered directly to such a narrow lineage. And each object in Sports is worthy of the scrutiny imparted to bbbb, and certainly more than I am able to offer here.I am a painter; that is how I think of myself. However, I increasingly feel we are doing a disservice to the things we call paintings by calling them so, if only because to name the thing is to have that thing exist as a kind of shorthand. Given the way we are inundated with images, everything often feels reduced to a similar shorthand; made in such a way to be immediately digestible, understood and discarded. And maybe my pessimism about the moniker of painting is such because that’s just how I am. But maybe it’s so because it seems that, if one were to survey the painting exhibitions across New York over the past few months or even several years, it seems there is a Sisyphean impulse to compete with the over-saturation of images and embrace the shorthand of painting: another exhibition of paintings of or about photography; another hastily produced series of thin, impulsive abstractions, made market-ready, and seamlessly palatable.It’s the shorthand for painting that makes this possible: there is canvas and there is paint, therefore this is a painting. Duchamp was right; in the modern era, the ubiquity of the tube of paint rendered it a readymade in its own right, and thereby paintings, as much as any stool impaled with a bicycle fork and wheel, are readymade as well. But that isn’t to say that all paintings are this way, or that whether or not the paint came from a tube matters at all. Instead, it is the consideration of material specificity, with all of its baggage and heft, like the way one pigment reflects and another absorbs the light around it—the kind of thing that can only ever be appreciated when standing in front of it—that matters.My point is not to ring another death-knell for painting. On the contrary, the history of painting is as rich an avenue for making meaning as any other. Rather, it’s to say that material nuance, in painting especially, is a dying light, and it seems it is only in rare instances, like CrossLypka’s Sports, that it can be revived just enough to instill the faith to keep looking, and looking closely. It’s to say that the image is an object first, even if you only ever see it on your phone.

CrossLypka, Sports, Bureau, April 25 - May 30, 2026About the Author:
Ian Myers is a painter and teacher based in Brooklyn. He received his BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art and MFA from Hunter College.

“Something Human is Up There”

May 13, 2026, by Arnold Klein

To LB, who was more worth watching than the movies that hypnotized her

                            With force and fascination I drew on
                            The wished sight...
                                   —Death's Jest-Book

“Print,” said Lamb, by way of explaining his refusal to read poems in manuscript, “print settles it.” So we might say of many a once hotly-debated philosophical question that time has settled it. No one today argues whether or not kings reign by divine right, for example, or seriously vexes the protocols of animal sacrifice in the temple at Jerusalem.But time is a somewhat less-than final arbiter in these affairs—it has an unfortunate tendency to “march on,” and though kings may have been permanently, i.e., for the foreseeable future, obsoleted, it is not hard to imagine that hereditary autocrats may soon begin to claim divine sanction for their heirs apparent, and though only a few dogged traditionalists try ritually to slaughter goats in Jerusalem today, the liability to orthodoxy is so natural to the religious temperament that we may soon see the question of which side of the altar is properly to be besmeared with gore once again passionately mooted by casuists (and, not impossibly, settled by force).What all this comes to, with respect to my proposition—that the movies are not an art—is that empirical surveys must be inconclusive. That one hundred and twenty-five years of movie making have failed to produce a single work of art cannot be urged finally to have verified it, since tomorrow, or next year, or in dim futurity, a work of art may at last stumble out of the darkness of the cutting room. Our present sample size is indeed very large, its confidence interval asymptotically approaching ever closer to unity with each release, but any extrapolation from it is subject, like all such projections, to probabilities; and though these may already be weighty enough to produce “indefectible conviction” in some, they can never satisfy a truly exact thinker. Numerical verification of an hypothesis does not satisfy mathematicians, since there is no guarantee that a counter-example won't turn up after 10316 iterations; they want a proof. So here: only a natural dimostramento, a demonstration from essences, from the inherent nature of the medium of motion pictures itself, will make our conviction indefectible; absent such a proof, it can only be a presumption, however solidly grounded. And, like the poet cited above, I ask for a discerning auditory, for I do not hope anything I say will do, what one hundred and twenty-five years of plain experience has not done, namely, to make the slightest dent in the (block) heads of cinephiles, movie-nuts or (as we will see) anime apologists. Their zealotry will, however, have eventually to be accounted for on principle, and, as I hope to show, will itself prove to be the most telling evidence for the essentially non-artistic character of their beloved medium.Before I go roundabout to my exact demonstration, let me obviate a few objections that might naturally arise in the minds of even the most well-disposed reader.In asserting that no movie to date has been, and none can ever be, a work of art I am not to be taken as denying, what is self-evidently the case, namely, that some movies are better than others. I would never deny that, performance for performance, Au Hasard Balthazar is a better movie than Francis the Talking Mule, which in turn is better than Francis [the Talking Mule] Joins the WACS (and I speak as one of the few alive who has seen all three—in movie theaters, at least); nor that Black Narcissus is a psychologically deeper movie than The Creature from the Black Lagoon (deep as that lagoon is) or Alias Boston Blackie; nor that Nosferatu is a much more visually arresting movie than Nosferatu, or even than Nosferatu—if you like, by increasing orders of magnitude in each superlative case. But the question isn't whether movies are comparable within their class, but whether that class is works of art. Counter-examples such as the three adduced above beg precisely that question; nor, as certain as their masterpiece status seems now to be, is it immune to empirical revision, or even reversal—it is not unheard of today for a once-time-honored “classic” to become, as they say, “cringe,” or only “now” of “period” interest: witness the sad fates of Birth of a Nation and (incredibly, to me) Potemkin.The truth is, that “art,” or “work of art,” and so on, are today honorifics, employed to praise something as excellent in its class, or to lift it out of its class altogether in order to place it into a presumably more exalted one. In neither case does the question of essential incommensurability check the enthusiast. After all, some soaps lather better than others, but I do not on that account feel tempted to class even the best of these with The Birth of Venus or “The Shampoo.” Yet in calling Stagecoach (say) a work of art, the fancier is, in the first case tacitly, and in the second, openly, acknowledging that there exists a class apart from, and higher than, the one, movies, to which it naively, and we will assert, essentially, belongs, and out of which, in the latter case, she wishes to effect its transmigration, and with it, surreptitiously, by a sort of back-contamination, all movies. The attempt to exalt movies as art is thus a proof of their (inferior) non-art status in the mind of the exalter herself. After all, no one would praise, or even think to classify, a Rothko as a “work of art.” A work of art is simply what it is. A work of art is simply what enthusiasts wish their favorite movies individually were; and the only way they have to fulfill this Wunschtraum is magically to assume a priori that fulfilled it has already been.The honorific content of these art-terms is about all the meaning they presently popularly possess; people talk of the decorative swirls in cups of latte as being “art,” the same way they talk of doughnuts as being “divine”—without, that is, thinking of what such honorifics originally, essentially, existentially and in eternity actually mean, no less of the objects to which the terms properly apply; they say, for example, that this wide receiver, or that bartender, or that Lamborghini is “poetry in motion,” without having sufficient familiarity with the honorable thing itself to recognize that poetry is already in motion. And so it is with films called “works of art.”None of this is proof, of course. But it may be offered in further illustration of their tendency to Wunschtraumerfüllung, that movie-lovers have no place in their triumphalist histories of film for those who denied its aesthetic status at the outset, except, perhaps, chained behind D.W. Griffith's chariot. But it is not the deniers' instincts that I wish to vindicate so much as the defenders' arguments, for these are actually more fatal to the case for film-as-art than any outside attack could possibly be; and more favorable, therefore, to my, as it were, inside one. Indeed, they will, in the roundabout fashion I warned of, actually prove it.Let us return to this now-oblived controversy for a moment. The year is 1933; and to the charge that, as it did nothing but mechanically reproduce “reality,” film could not be an art, a (in my opinion somewhat too-) celebrated arbitrageur between the realms of psychology and aesthetics is assiduously enumerating all the ways the cinematic image differs from our normal perceptions, some relating to picture, some to motion. Observe that, as his argument refers to permanent-technical and, in the last analysis, neurological, factors, it is timeless—his points are as valid, or as invalid, today, and will be forever, as they were then. Observe, too, that he shares with his opponents the conviction that works of art substantially depart from reality; that “reproduce” it art works essentially do not do; so if his alleged divergences from reality fail, his defense will be found to be an argument for the position he is striving to refute, viz., that film is no art.These differences, then, are the crux of his argument. To take only a few (for only a few will suffice):Item, film images differ from normal perception in that they are two dimensional—but (he is forced to allow) “the movement of people or objects from front to back makes a certain depth evident,” as does “perspective overlapping.” Thus, “film pictures are at once plane and solid.” But so, too, are our everyday perceptions, at once plane and solid, if they are not, as some philosophers have argued, entirely planar. So our divergence evaporates.Item, film images are (what we would call) “framed”: “The limitations of the picture are felt immediately.” But (he is forced to allow) “our [normal] visual field is limited” too, although “the limitation of our range of vision never obtrudes itself.” The adverbial distinction of immediately and never would hardly do even if it applied; but, of course, we feel the limitations of our normal field of vision immediately whenever something occurs behind us, and behind us a good deal of the world typically lurks—indeed, having “eyes in the back of your head” is no mere figure of speech to a New York City straphanger; and, of course, the framing edge of a movie is, like the silhouettes of those seated in front of us in the theater, one of the features we are never aware of, so effortlessly do we “disimagine” it, to use Collingwood's excellent coinage, unless, of course, the cinematography calls our attention to it, as in Blair Witch. So we have two “circumscribed” fields, whose respective peripheries in reality may, or may not, become relevant to our experience with about the same frequency, if not less, in the case of film; and another divergence evaporates.Item, film sequences can violate “the space-time continuum”: we cannot, that is, in reality, as we can in movies, jump-cut in time or space—we must pass through the intervening space to get from here to there, and live through the intervening time. Cavell, however (from whom we have borrowed our title), remarks that film grammar—editing, that is, to which Arnheim (for it is he) is referring here—was easily assimilated by mass audiences, as, we will add, chord progressions and trobar clus have never been; and its reception would not have been so painlessly effected were there not something in our everyday reality corresponding to jumping over intervening spaces and time-spans. And this something, is, of course, memory, in the broadest sense of calling absent facts or fancies to present consciousness—the “extensive view” (extensive in time as well as space) that is notorious for bringing China and Peru into a single apperceptive survey. So once again, the alleged divergence evaporates.As to some of his other evaporating divergences: absence of color—we experience this every night; absence of other senses (smell, hearing, etc.)—we experience this every time we look through a window; purposive lighting—no need to comment; camera angle and motion—we always occupy a viewpoint, often a moving one and—to go further—are always mis en scènes, very often in a “surround,” as Goffman would say, with others, and—at least if the sociologists are right—always performing in them when we are.

And lest we forget: we are always moving, as are “all the works of nature” and a great many of the works of humankind; and the techniques of slow or accelerated motion, offered as divergences from reality, are, as motions, continuous with, and qua fast or slow, relative to, our own usual pace; and neither would be intelligible with respect to speed, and that instantly, were they not.And so our friend's argument collapses. It has had the virtue, however, of having addressed itself to the essential foundations of film: for without motion and without pictures there are no motion pictures.Film, then, we are free to conclude, essentially follows our normal faculties of perception and apperception; that is to say, the effort at determination and correlation of what passes before us in movies is equivalent to the effort required of us in everyday experience. We will now add, that film not only harmonizes with our faculties in this way, but, as it were, flatters them—makes, that is, even fewer demands upon them—and doing their work for them is precisely the end to which what Arnheim calls the “artistic” use of framing, editing, lighting and so on, are the technical means. This flattery, it is true, has become, in the hands of our current hyper-expert filmmakers, effective beyond belief: their movies are, with the greatest cinematic intelligence, nay, actual genius, pre-digested to be as undemanding, perceptively and apperceptively, as possible; but unexacting, in this respect, as we have seen, the motion picture essentially is.Now, it is evident that the several arts are constituted by their very mediums to make perception and apperception an accomplishment.From the specific ways each of the several arts does this, I single out one that they all, each in its own way, have in common, which I will call deduction; for what is not there must be, after their several fashions, continuously still realized, that is, kept before the mind in all its sensuous presentness, if the work is to be experienced as the work of art it essentially is.From the everyday experience of bodies in motion, for example, dance deducts, not merely the normal occasions for motion, voiced or unvoiced, but bodies themselves—for unless we, by continuously holding them in mind, in all their original force and liveliness, succeed in “seeing”—that is, in apprehending—the motions that the dancers have already made, we are not “seeing” the dance: we are watching the performance, not realizing the choreography, which is the art of dance. Music deducts, not merely all sensations but sound, but, in the same way as dance does bodies, deducts sound too: it is in this sense that it resembles mathematics, in being purely ideal; and the distinction here is between hearing the performance and realizing the composition. Sculpture deducts motion—and in the case of mobiles, deducts motives for motions; photography deducts motion from pictures; painting deducts real space from motions—for such successive changes as any given painting presents to long looking occur minus translation; the deductions of the novel, the drama and poetry are too numerous, and obvious, to mention: but in each of these something like the distinction between merely receiving and actually realizing holds good—realizing, in a sculpture, the specific motions latent in the unmoving form; in a photograph, the world from which it is excerpted; in a painting, its existence as pure duration; in a poem (to take only that), the silence of its voice.Theatre, if it is an art, as I have come to doubt, deducts the identity of the actor from the role, when, that is, the actor is artist enough to allow it to; film, on the contrary, as Cavell notes, deducts the role from the actor, or at least from the star—that is not Rick whatever-his-last name-is up there, it is Humphrey Bogart, not Charlotte Vale, but Bette Davis—a deduction that restores everyday perception, for, despite it all, Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis are who Rick and Charlotte Vale really are, and it does not require much effort to realize that, nor to realize that Queen Elizabeth is Bette Davis, made-up, and that Duke Mantee is Humphrey Bogart, mugging.Now, it may be objected that, on such a principle as this, trash novels and selfies are works of art, while such masterpieces as Earth and The Pagnol Trilogy are not. But I am not trying to define art, only to draw an essential distinction between it and film; and for this a necessary condition, even a negative one such as deduction, will do. Besides, to realize in the verily artistic mediums means to make real, the “real” referring to the presence of whatever is absent, and the “make,” to the effort required to apprehend it and to keep it before the mind in all its sensuous vividness; and, thanks to the omnipresence of cliches, these mediums may be so managed as to produce something that is not really real, that is, not concretely individual, and thus requiring no effort to grasp, and involving no reward for doing so. Still, it is worth noticing that the principle of deduction has a yonder bound: deduct too much and the medium, if it may be called that, ceases to be artistic in any way—thus cartoons, which deduct continuity of shape, or ice dancing, which deducts the frictional conditions of normal motion, are not arts, “however amusing the proceedings.”And further: I spoke of deductions; but, when it comes to real art works, the term that better catches the qualitative difference between them and other efforts in the same mediums is abnegation—il gran rifiuto. And if I am asked what is being refused, the answer is, the very thing that film has, empirically, instinctively embraced.Somewhere in his tedious exposition poor Arnheim remarks a little regretfully that almost all films up to that date have been used to tell stories, and ninety-one years later, we can remark the same liability. Despite the laments of the avant-garde that film might have, but for capitalism, or Stalinism, or something, despised novelistic precedents and pursued a non-narrative and non-commercial path, and despite the heroic efforts of the old 60s and 70s emulsion-scratchers to found an art of purely moving visual forms, film has remained stubbornly story-narrative, empirically speaking, at least.But our question is, is it essentially so? And here all those exploded divergences really tell. For what else could a medium that so closely follows our normal faculties of perception and apperception be, if not narrative?After all, our normal, and our most interested perceptions and apperceptions, and therefore the ones most easily enlisted and exploited for effect, concern human agents, who, in lit scenes, beheld from viewpoints, are seen to engage in purposeful, continuous, and for the most part, intelligible, motions, all the while performing gender, class, age-group, attitude toward the surround, and so forth. Attention to these mises en scènes becomes, because necessary, habitual; and it is to this habit that what we might call the habitus of motion pictures essentially conforms and appeals. Indeed, so ready are our faculties to anthropomorphize pictured motions, that moving pictures would, as it were, tell a story even without depicting human agents, and our old emulsion-scratchers are respectfully advised to keep this infallible propensity in mind, should they ever return to their carpenter's nails and etching needles for one last go; but, as human agents are the things upon which the relevant faculties are most instinctively focused, human doings become the essential, indeed, the predestinated subject of film. The old film-deniers were thus quite wrong in holding that film reproduced reality; what it does is reproduce psychology, in the old sense of the facultative soul, and may even be said to reproduce phylogeny, given that survival, primordially, primitively and even now, depends on continually monitoring the surround.And with that we can name what it is that film essentially embraces and the arts refuse.Humanity.Film is, by its very nature, addressed to normal human faculties and concerned with normal human interests, and these are the bases of its mass appeal and of the enthusiasm it inspires in its followers. It has no competitor in these respects except for popular songs, which, like it, flatter an innate susceptibility of humans (to rhythm) and rehearse simple human situations. The greater possibilities of simplification offered by their three-minute length would seem to give “pop” songs the advantage with respect to “audience-share,” and perhaps this factor provides the pressure under which movies are evolving towards all the simplifications that lie within their technical scope—to such an extent that, instead of calling anime movies, there may come a day when enthusiasts call movies anime. I leave the competition with video games to those who have surveyed them more closely; but even cinema zealots have acknowledged that contemporary film is more accurately understood as a genre of amusement-park thrill rides than as “the seventh art” it was once fervidly hailed to be.But be all that as it may, our original proposition, that movies are not an art, is seen to have its ultimate ground in the inescapable fact that something human is up there, whereas in the arts, properly so called, though in some works some thing of the human may be provisionally some where, this interest is subordinated to the sublimely indifferent one of formal beauty. It is a concern with this latter that all the several deductions of the arts add, or, if you prefer, leave over, when once the disturbing element of normal human interest has been remitted to those parties interested in it, namely, to normal human beings.Time, alas, having continued to “march on” since the above addendum was appended, recent developments in the arts themselves have shown that the, what we might call, “moralizing metonymic transfer” discussed above, is not the only, nor the most insidious, way in which mass cinephilia has succeeded in subduing the actual arts to the measure of the movies.We saw that the arts, properly so-called, as distinguished from the movies, make perception and apperception an accomplishment. Recognizing a variation in a theme (no less in a tone row), or a sub-rhythm in a line (no less a counterpointed strophe), or a structural principle in an abstract space (no less in an optical one), to take just these, already requires, in even the simplest instances, an effort of determination that recognizing the Blob in The Blob, the Thing in The Thing, or the talking mule in the never-to-be-forgotten Francis the Talking Mule, plainly does not; and although apologists for “the modern” in art, and in music, poetry and painting especially, have been at pains to defend it against complaints about what appear to most to be its “mulish vagary” by citing its “intrinsic difficulty,” it is well to remember that difficulty is a relative term, and, in the present instance, taken together with its correlate, refers to any departure from the easily assimilable, and demanding, in precisely this sense, the arts, by virtue of what above we called their “deductive” mediums, and of countless other ways as well, have always been. If complaints about their difficulty are no longer (but for a few legacy headscratchers like Pierrot Lunaire or Finnegans Wake) still heard, it is not because cinephiles, confident that theirs is “the seventh art,” have courteously ceded to its six exhausted senescent sisters a little latitude in the difficulty department, but because they have, by various means, succeeded in evacuating from artworks anything that would have otherwise given them the pip—in making, that is, The Waste Land as easily digestible as The Walking Dead, if less “thought-provoking.”What those means are we will come to shortly; for now, let it suffice that they all involve the sort of inversions noted many times above.A celebrated movie director recently forewent studio backing and self-funded, as they say, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, the production of his “passion project.” This expenditure was considered a proof of his remarkable commitment—though, of course, “self-funded” (in the aesthetic sense) autonomous artworks have always been, and a great deal more than money has been bled to produce them. The result, anyway, was something the film intelligentsia instantly and unanimously pronounced “a mess.” But, again, a mess is relative to some pre-existing idea of order; and that the cinephile élite found this movie a mess (forgive the repetition, but they seemed bereft of any other word with which to describe it) proved, on closer inspection, simply to mean that it taxed their powers of apprehension past what they had been (dare we say potty-?) trained to expect. But, after all, the motion picture in question was composed of moving pictures of human agents—was still, that is, very recognizably a motion picture—with all the flattering perceptibilities and apperceptibilities such an ontological status essentially entails. Inadequately legible its departures might have been, exasperating to its critics they certainly were, and celebrated by future generations of cineastes they may well inevitably be, they nonetheless remained within cinema—they were just not flattering enough for the faculties of a cohort conditioned by the medium itself, and habituated by its by-now hyper-expert practitioners, to demand even deviations be more or less directly intelligible.After what specific motes in that “mess” these connoisseurs were straining, having swallowed those camels, I leave it to others to determine. But if such was the response of a cineaste élite to what was still recognizably a movie, what will be the response of the cinephile mass when confronted with a unique thing that, rather than beguilingly smoothly adapting itself to their faculties, demands that they adapt their faculties to it, or come away with nothing—that is, when faced with a concretely individual work of art?In light of the developments mentioned above, such philistine histrionics as are reputed to have befallen Blue Nude would be welcome. But no: in fact “the challenge of art” is, as Gilson puts it, not dismissed with guffaws (or with hisses or fisticuffs, to cite some other débuts scandaleux) but confidently “answered”—that is, dodged—by assigning the undomesticable, indigestible, intractable thing in question its proper place in—what else?—a humanized narrative.The work is not repudiated, heavens forfend—it is simply ignored, in favor of a story which situates it. The primary, but not the only, move in this project is to substitute, for the (present) artwork, the (absent, and possibly long-deceased) empirical person (naively) taken to be the artist.Now, it is worth pointing out, as it has become necessary to do, that a work of art, once finished, does not, in its aesthetic character, change, which is simply to say that the words of a poem, or the notes of a score, for example, do not rearrange themselves when the book is closed. Nor does the finished work develop—it does not, that is, spontaneously turn into some further state of itself. Nor does it generate another work—paintings do not have offspring by parthenogenesis or mitosis, or by conjugation either, however close to one another they may be hung—nor, for that matter, do they go out drinking with their fellow artworks when the museum or library closes. Nor is the work contagious, like influence—I mean, like influenza—nor is it infectable, once finished. Nor, having been the work of, let us say, a female Jewish-American person, is it female, Jewish, American, or a person. Change, develop, generate, associate, influence and be influenced, keep kosher, vote, and so forth are all things that artists do or are, or can do or can be; and it is easy to see how their lives, their influences, their development, their identities, their circles, their saloons, their cenacles, their milieux, etc., which really do involve time and change in their structure, may be enlisted, or rather, seized upon, in the interes

Addendum: On Some Consequences of the Foregoing

I said above that time is a fickle arbiter—that many once dead-and-buried points of controversy may, as it “marches on,” return to liveliness. I will now add, that such an issue may not only be resurrected, but the original verdict upon it reversed.Such has been the case with the relation of art and morality. When I was young, it was taken for granted that the pretensions of morality to rule over aesthetics had been absolutely exploded—that the struggle between them had been fought in the nineteen-twenties, chiefly over the status of the Fleurs de Mal, and the philistines had been utterly routed. It was simply the case that, to put it one way, the Good and the Beautiful were independent transcendentals, each convertible indeed with Being, but not convertible each into the other; or (to put it another way) that the artist, in heedlessly, selfishly, even demonically, pursuing beauty, had, insofar as her work attained that goal, already fulfilled her moral (social) duty; or (to put it the best way, as we shall see) that the only “good” the artist need be concerned with was the good of the work to be done.Today, of course, the boot is on the other leg. Morality rules art, and even the demonic “genius,” her claim to that status dismissed by the inverted commas, must observe the pieties; even as aloof a thing as an abstract painting is required to “justify itself” before the bars of politics and social utility; and he/she/they who writes a love poem, voicing the same sentiments that lovers have voiced since Ur, may have to answer the charge of “objectifying” the beloved. The old question, “can a morally reprehensible person make a great work of art?” is answered No in thunder; and moral critics, with all of Ruskin's certitude, but somewhat less of his eloquence, have sunk many a quondam masterpiece on the grounds of what often amount to reports, i.e., hearsay, about the personal vices of its empirical creator. How Baudelaire has fared in this climate I am too-easily disheartened to research; but the poet who, in wonderfully melodious verses, fantasized about ejaculating his (syphilitic) semen into a wound in a woman's “flank” that he has opened with that express purpose in view, is unlikely to be celebrated, as he once was, as a great liberating figure in the arts. Even, in that interregnum of the nineteen-eighties, when he was extolled for “transgressing” morality, the allowance was conceded on (higher) moral, and not proper aesthetic, grounds—the poetic value of the poems did not come into it, only their scandalous occasions.Now, I think that, for this great reversal of sensibility, vast in its implications for both critical evaluation and artistic practice, the vulgar notion that the movies are an art is largely responsible. I will, as before, go round about to reach this perhaps initially startling conclusion. And, as before, the essential nature of the motion picture medium will be the ground of all I have to urge against it in this regard. And, again, by “movies,” I am to be taken as referring to television and anime as well.A controversy currently agitating the movie fandom, or at least, its intelligentsia (whom one wishes would find something less unintelligent to talk about), is whether “depiction equals endorsement,” or, as it is often formulated, whether “problematic portrayals normalize [sometimes propagandize for] behavior.” Thus, I have heard it asked (by the same commentator, albeit in different commentaries), whether a film in which a fifteen-year-old boy has an affair with a twenty-five- year-old woman, or one in which a forty-year-old man has one with a twenty-five-year-old girl, endorses “age-gap” relationships, antecedently recognized to be in themselves disapprovable—”not okay” or “never okay.”Now, such a question would be unlikely to be naively asked of art works such as Torse or Rhoda in Potatoland, and not only because these have, when compared to movies, minuscule audiences. It is, of course, legitimate, given their tremendous popularity, to be, as have moralizers always been, to the point of legislating “codes,” concerned with the moral “influence” of motion pictures—nay, to be positively alarmed by the fascist sub-, i.e., plain-, texts of superhero movies of the Marvel Comic book or Princess Mononoke type, though I observe no “X rating” threatens these puerilities—the old aphorism, that “all genres lean right,” would be truer to our time if “lean” were replaced with plunge. But we cannot rest with so simple a view of the matter. For the purchase morality claims to have on movies is the result, not of their mass popularity, for this is itself merely a second-order effect, but of something absolutely fundamental.That fundamental something is the intrinsic appeal movies make to our ordinary faculties of perception and apperception. These, we said above, movies reproduce and flatter by what they show; and, we will now add, do so just as fully by what they cannot show. For just as the movies reproduce the normal functions of perception and apperception, so also do they reproduce the normal limits of these faculties.Normal perception gives us the bodies, motions, postures, etc., of the people in our “surround,” which are, furthermore, “framed” for us by the muscular-skeletal fact that the visual field is more easily surveyed horizontally than vertically; the “aspect ratios” of movie and television screens obviously reproduce this natural prolate-ellipsoid proclivity. So far, so familiar from the main body of this essay. But be the oval of vision what it will, what we cannot perceive in any orientation are the minds of others, their internal lives; these we depend on inference to divine; and inference, relating as it does present appearances to past experiences of similar ones no longer perceptible, is an apperceptive act.Now, it goes without saying that inferences are always dubious; and we should be in a constant dither of uncertainty were not a “schedule of displays” at hand to make our orientation to the surround easily legible to others in it, and theirs, to us. But displays can only do so much; and the neutral expression of the person across the subway car from you, displaying, as it legibly does, beyond merely her present compliance with that schedule, the absence of hostile intent, shows you nothing about the emotions and thoughts going on behind it—these are actually inscrutable.This essential inscrutability of the human countenance, so briefly described but so thoroughly penetrated and searched by the great novels, film cannot help but reproduce, as reproduce the conditions of normal perception it must always do. But it can reduce the apperceptive burden of inference by increasing the legibility of thoughts and emotions—the grimaces of the actors, the simplification of character to a narrow psychological range of types, the generic conventions of story, the manipulation of lighting, point of view and so on, flatter apperception by directing inference in one direction only. And if movies remain somewhat at a loss about what to do with the act of thinking itself, well, so too are we in real life at a loss, unless it externalize itself adequately in some form or another, such as a book or a painting, and not, as with movies it must, in a snatch of dialogue and/or (and for some celebrated directors, who pride themselves on being “visual story tellers,” preferably) in a dramatically furrowed brow.Now, when the film intelligentsia say that certain portrayals in film “equal,” “endorse,” “normalize” or “propagandize for” conduct or attitudes, they mean, of course, equal, endorse, normalize and propagandize for them in real life; and the transfer, as of a decal, from the one to the other is unobstructed for all the medium-specific reasons we have stated; but, for the same reasons, this time relating to medium-specific limits, rarely so unambiguously made as to deny controversial catnip to critics. For our purposes, it is enough that both sides in such controversies take for granted, what is essentially true of film, that when the portraying actor is doing something even as politically unobjectionable as smiling (no less leering), he is presenting the material equivalent of an immaterial, in this case, a psychic, state, just as he would be in real life, and readable there by the same means; and ditto for more lengthily labored aggregate displays readable under such general and therefore abstract rubrics as “age-gap relationships.”What all this comes to is that what we see on screen is the corporeal equivalent of an incorporeal state not then visible and usually, as in the case of abstract nouns—some of which end in -ship, others in -ity, still others in -tion, and not a few in -ism—never so; and whenever we have a corporeal equivalent of an incorporeal state we have what Kenneth Burke calls metonymy.Film, then, is metonymic by the very nature of its medium—the *something human up there *is intrinsically readable as something human out here; and this is indeed the ground of its popularity and the key to understanding the right-ward direction of its history. The moralizers thus have a justification for their concern; whether that justification justifies anything further need not detain us here.Now, although some of the arts may employ metonymy as a figure, the arts themselves are not metonymous. They are autonomous; that is to say, far from being a corporeal equivalent of an incorporeal state, each real work is the corporeal equivalent of itself alone—this is, indeed, what we mean when we refer to each work as a concrete, self-subsistent and self-intelligible individual; and it is only by mistaking them for an art that the expectation of metonymy, inescapable in motion pictures, and the moral preoccupations relevant thereto, has been transferred to the real arts, with the evil consequences mentioned above. In other words, fans, having first made the cinema into one of the arts, have ended by making all of the arts into cinema.But conditions are what they are; and we should not call the times evil “unless they make us so.” The perfection of the work to be done remains the good of the artist qua artist; and if seeking this non-moral good makes her, as I believe Maritain puts it, “inhuman,” well, so much the better for the work. I will not return to Baudelaire in this regard, for there are too many subtilties and ambiguities in even one of his poems, no less the whole sequence, to deal with here; but I will say to all love poets that, if their poem is charged with “objectifying” the beloved, they should rejoice in the reprehension; for in an art that makes so many deductions, divesting a subject of her subjecthood is but one deduction the more.

Addendum Two: The Same Topic, Continued

Time, alas, having continued to “march on” since the above addendum was appended, recent developments in the arts themselves have shown that the, what we might call, “moralizing metonymic transfer” discussed above, is not the only, nor the most insidious, way in which mass cinephilia has succeeded in subduing the actual arts to the measure of the movies.We saw that the arts, properly so-called, as distinguished from the movies, make perception and apperception an accomplishment. Recognizing a variation in a theme (no less in a tone row), or a sub-rhythm in a line (no less a counterpointed strophe), or a structural principle in an abstract space (no less in an optical one), to take just these, already requires, in even the simplest instances, an effort of determination that recognizing the Blob in The Blob, the Thing in The Thing, or the talking mule in the never-to-be-forgotten Francis the Talking Mule, plainly does not; and although apologists for “the modern” in art, and in music, poetry and painting especially, have been at pains to defend it against complaints about what appear to most to be its “mulish vagary” by citing its “intrinsic difficulty,” it is well to remember that difficulty is a relative term, and, in the present instance, taken together with its correlate, refers to any departure from the easily assimilable, and demanding, in precisely this sense, the arts, by virtue of what above we called their “deductive” mediums, and of countless other ways as well, have always been. If complaints about their difficulty are no longer (but for a few legacy headscratchers like Pierrot Lunaire or Finnegans Wake) still heard, it is not because cinephiles, confident that theirs is “the seventh art,” have courteously ceded to its six exhausted senescent sisters a little latitude in the difficulty department, but because they have, by various means, succeeded in evacuating from artworks anything that would have otherwise given them the pip—in making, that is, The Waste Land as easily digestible as The Walking Dead, if less “thought-provoking.”What those means are we will come to shortly; for now, let it suffice that they all involve the sort of inversions noted many times above.A celebrated movie director recently forewent studio backing and self-funded, as they say, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, the production of his “passion project.” This expenditure was considered a proof of his remarkable commitment—though, of course, “self-funded” (in the aesthetic sense) autonomous artworks have always been, and a great deal more than money has been bled to produce them. The result, anyway, was something the film intelligentsia instantly and unanimously pronounced “a mess.” But, again, a mess is relative to some pre-existing idea of order; and that the cinephile élite found this movie a mess (forgive the repetition, but they seemed bereft of any other word with which to describe it) proved, on closer inspection, simply to mean that it taxed their powers of apprehension past what they had been (dare we say potty-?) trained to expect. But, after all, the motion picture in question was composed of moving pictures of human agents—was still, that is, very recognizably a motion picture—with all the flattering perceptibilities and apperceptibilities such an ontological status essentially entails. Inadequately legible its departures might have been, exasperating to its critics they certainly were, and celebrated by future generations of cineastes they may well inevitably be, they nonetheless remained within cinema—they were just not flattering enough for the faculties of a cohort conditioned by the medium itself, and habituated by its by-now hyper-expert practitioners, to demand even deviations be more or less directly intelligible.After what specific motes in that “mess” these connoisseurs were straining, having swallowed those camels, I leave it to others to determine. But if such was the response of a cineaste élite to what was still recognizably a movie, what will be the response of the cinephile mass when confronted with a unique thing that, rather than beguilingly smoothly adapting itself to their faculties, demands that they adapt their faculties to it, or come away with nothing—that is, when faced with a concretely individual work of art?In light of the developments mentioned above, such philistine histrionics as are reputed to have befallen Blue Nude would be welcome. But no: in fact “the challenge of art” is, as Gilson puts it, not dismissed with guffaws (or with hisses or fisticuffs, to cite some other débuts scandaleux) but confidently “answered”—that is, dodged—by assigning the undomesticable, indigestible, intractable thing in question its proper place in—what else?—a humanized narrative.The work is not repudiated, heavens forfend—it is simply ignored, in favor of a story which situates it. The primary, but not the only, move in this project is to substitute, for the (present) artwork, the (absent, and possibly long-deceased) empirical person (naively) taken to be the artist.Now, it is worth pointing out, as it has become necessary to do, that a work of art, once finished, does not, in its aesthetic character, change, which is simply to say that the words of a poem, or the notes of a score, for example, do not rearrange themselves when the book is closed. Nor does the finished work develop—it does not, that is, spontaneously turn into some further state of itself. Nor does it generate another work—paintings do not have offspring by parthenogenesis or mitosis, or by conjugation either, however close to one another they may be hung—nor, for that matter, do they go out drinking with their fellow artworks when the museum or library closes. Nor is the work contagious, like influence—I mean, like influenza—nor is it infectable, once finished. Nor, having been the work of, let us say, a female Jewish-American person, is it female, Jewish, American, or a person. Change, develop, generate, associate, influence and be influenced, keep kosher, vote, and so forth are all things that artists do or are, or can do or can be; and it is easy to see how their lives, their influences, their development, their identities, their circles, their saloons, their cenacles, their milieux, etc., which really do involve time and change in their structure, may be enlisted, or rather, seized upon, in the interest of providing their works, what the works themselves cannot, namely, a humanized narrative that explains them.And this, notwithstanding—in a way, because of—the necessarily fragmentary nature of the residues of the artist's actual existence, for all that we really have of any life—and here the reader is invited to consider her own for confirmation—are minuscule remainders of the many-dimensioned, continuously-conscious, ever-changing whole, in virtue of whose imperfection every biography must be a caricature. Nor is the biographical stick-figure that emerges by guesswork from the fragments made any more substantial by being inserted in any one, or all, of the “wider contexts”—economic, social, institutional, stylistic, intellectual or even aesthetic—conjured up by the art historian, and even by the real historian, out of the likewise-fragmentary residues of some (arbitrarily) delimited spatio-temporal continuum. These latter accounts, as they, too, all survey a necessarily indeterminate field of promiscuous fragments, promiscuously preserved, though not always caricatures, can never be more than what real historians acknowledge them frankly to be, namely “interpretations.” Narrow or wide, then, all such accounts are bound, by the nature of their materials, to be simplifications, and it is perhaps unfair to charge them all with being simplistic. But simplistic in the extreme do they become when once their caricatures or characterizations are used as explanatory calculuses to settle scores with a complex individual and self-sovereign work of art, whose genesis and development we are, as Gilson bluntly puts it, “simply not in on,” and would be what it is whether we were or not.But, of course, gossip about artists and nonsense about contexts are exactly what appeals to the cinephile mass, habituated as they are to having simplified inferences made for them, by all the filmic means we have already considered. In movies, however, the already-directed perceptible presentation, such as the actor's grimace, is directed still further to an already-simplified efficient cause, namely, the character's anguish (or whatever) at its situation; with an artwork, the illation is reversed: acquaintance with the imperceptible biographically or historically hypothetical cause precedes and directs acquaintance with its perceptible hypothetical effect, the work, with which, of course, no acquaintance on these terms is possible.True, cattiness and sciolism have probably been with us always; but, still, the discovery of their serviceableness in aesthetics is recent enough for Hanslick to have noted it for a novelty in the 1890s, and—real critic that he was—to have decried it as the impertinence it most eternally is and must be. It is hard not to see the increasing normalization of “contextual readings,” biographical or otherwise, in classrooms, galleries, museums, university-press catalogues, journals and elsewhere as a reflex of the demand for effortless intelligibility fostered in the cinephile mass by the development of ever-more flattering techniques of film; indeed, the degree to which these fatuities have come to precede, supersede and finally supplant interest in individual works is what we might call the cinephiliac contribution to culture.Two reflexes of this reflex are worth considering.The demand, be it recalled, is for a humanized narrative. Qua humanized, this is met by shifting interest from the artwork, which is not human in any respect, to the empirical person or artist, which is human, and in every respect but that of her aesthetic physiognomy, which happens to be the only one that may (or may not) aesthetically count. The effects of this shift have been sufficiently ventilated.But, of course, a narrative requires a succession of terms; and, qua narrative, there has been a corresponding shift of interest from the individual work, which is a self-subsistent term an sich, to some sort of series, as in the oeuvre, through which back-door the ever-changing, ever-influenceable, ever-developing empirical person of the artist is reintroduced and again becomes the focus of interest, or in the gallery or museum show or retrospective, whose very rationale is to collocate multiple works on the pretext that they “contextualize” each other, or are all of them “contextualized” by some supposititious afflatus.The oeuvre is the happy-hunting ground of literary historians, academic commentators, popular biographers, and even public-television documentarians, who vastly outnumber, and who certainly outsell, literary artists. The show is the bailiwick of the curator, who not long ago was charged with selecting individual works whose aesthetic merits justified their acquisition, but who is now personally celebrated for collocating works under some writ, biographical, historical, stylistic, or what-not. In somewhat the same manner in which “poetry reading” has come to mean, not reading poetry yourself, but having it read to you, to “see the show” means just that—to see the show, not, that is, to see any individual work in it as an individual work, but at most to see each as an illustration of the show's always thematic, usually conceptual and ultimately verbal rubric—and I use this, still-liturgical, term to remind the reader of the original meaning of “cure,” “curation” and “curatorial.”The art curator, who has lately come to claim the title of artist, has been allowed to make herself a usurper; but the art critic, whose beat the show has become, has degraded herself into a posturer.If we ask by what means (besides possessing a great prose style) a critic proves herself worthy of credit, we shall find only the power of eliciting, from individual works, the principles and co-factors that make each the very work it is, and no other, whatever relations between works she might afterwards find it illuminating to consider—that is, by her demonstrating superior, often enough pioneering, powers of perception and apperception, to whose acuity we provisionally, but always profitably, submit our own. Criticism, so understood, is a vocation, and a rarer one even than that of artist—rarer even than sainthood12—and when not so practiced degenerates into “art writing,” art-world gossip, restaurant-style show-reviewing, grandstanding or simply celebrity journalism.By abetting cinephile taste, the curator and the critic, like the biographical caricaturist and the wider-context-monger with whom they overlap and interpenetrate, have committed treason against the essential haecceity of art—I say again, have committed treason against the essential haecceity of art. But worse than these are those fifth-columnists, themselves natural-born members of the cinematic mass, who, partly by seeking after “effects,” but chiefly, for our purposes, by expressly embedding their efforts in humanized narratives, either art-historical or identity-autobiographical, have imported cinematic norms into the arts, properly so-called, themselves—I mean, the artists, or rather, the artists falsely so-called, as the criterion of validity in this business is precisely loyalty to the medium.We saw that the motion picture essentially and eternally involves reproducing the everyday world of perception and apperception, while the arts, properly so-called, essentially problematize the use of those faculties, and this, by virtue of their several mediums, of whose manifold specific particularities we singled out one they had in common. But medium-specificity is the ineffaceable ground and final justification of artistic production: there is no painting without something like paint, no poetry without something like chant, no music without something like tones, and so on through, and it is with, and within, these limitations that the arts triumph over the induration and obtundation of our vital faculties brought on by use, disuse, and misuse. That the very idea of the arts being materially several is in danger of being drowned in the backwash, undertow and rip current of the cinema is indeed very true; but if, as the poet says, Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch, it is precisely there, nighmost this catastrophe, in their materials, and nowhere else, that the saving agency to be found. Since it necessarily involves continual self-estrangement from the omniprevalent cinephile regime, we may call loyalty to the medium the aristocratic form of exile.

About the Author:
Kid Twist's work may be found in The Revenant Quarterly.

Raphael: Sublime Poetry
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

May 10, 2026 | by Brock Riggins

Raphael, Head of a Young Woman in Three-Quarter View, Looking Down (Study for the Figure of Charity, Sala di Costantino), 1519-20. Charcoal, chalk, and gouche on beige paper.

When we look at Raphael, where are we? Italy, maybe, but the background more often resembles the surface of Saturn’s furthest moon.After a touching self-portrait, the show offers an answer. In Fra Carnevale’s The Ideal City, a few unfortunates are trapped inside a vortex of flat churches and wide squares; you hear echoes of sharp shoes. The painting is an early attempt to work out linear perspective, that era’s big new idea. It’s rough—statues writhe in pain—but it balances well against surroundings of expected, somewhat bland embellishments of Christian gold leaf. I see why artists were bored. And when artists are bored, they play. I like play. I like painterly scaffolding. These aren’t in the show, but I like that Botticelli where Saint Zenobius teleports around a computer game. I like Piero flagellating Christ on a microchip. I like Masaccio putting the crucifixion at the end of a hallway. I like Raphael marrying the Virgin into a civic engineer’s fever dream. At different points in space-time, when Van Eyck and Leonardo take us further than Saturn’s moons, the amateur is intimidated by cloaks of perfection. “There’s no way I could do that,” they say—and they’re right. But, at the beginning, sometimes, they were just like everyone else. I think about this while standing below one of Raphael’s first major works, a massive altarpiece housed on a bright blue curatorial pillar. My eyes feel blurry and my head is in need of one of those cheap plastic visors, or dark sunglasses, or anything else to stop the rays from penetrating my forehead. I am saved only by sudden distraction.“WOW, would you! WOW! LOOK AT THAT! Aye, aye, aye!” then lots of camera clicking from an unsilenced cellphone. I make eyes with two of my friends; they are laughing too.I walk around the bright blue curatorial pillar. I find him. He is wearing a wool hat. Gray, flat on top, stuck to his head like the lid of a prescription bottle. An orange leather jacket sits over a cloth polo, both buttons unbuttoned. His big black boots are the big black boots you find on the feet of that middle school boy who never washes his hair, has one best friend, and knows everything there is to know about photosynthesis.“SEE! Look, look, look. He made a mistake,” picture, picture, “he made a mistake. If a guy like that can make a mistake then maybe there’s some hope for the rest of us—see?” picture, “But let me tell you something,” he’s talking to a female friend of mine, “Raphael knew women and Raphael LOVED women. Michelangelo not so much. Donatello not so much. But Raphael loved women and knew it was all in the eyes. He knew beauty was in the eyes. Raphael knew this but here, LOOK,” he leans in, “LOOK! He made a mistake… a guy like that! HAH! LOOK!” and then more pictures and my friend smiles and walks away. My turn.“LOOK, see? This one: PERFECT!… but the other,” picture, picture, “the other not so much.”“Yeah, you’re right.”“You know,” he lowers his phone, “you should get into AI. How are you not in AI? You’re young. Why aren’t you making a million dollars in AI? You don’t even need a good idea, you just need to pitch them whatever and they’ll give you a million dollars and when you get your first billion you have to open a museum and make it free for everyone because that’s what Alice Walton did,” picture, “these people with all this money are a little crazy, don’t you think? Trying to become the world’s first trillionaire and all that. That’s a little crazy, don’t you think? But with nuclear war and all that, with this Strait of Hormuz, which I think is not so bad because you know these Iolas [sic] are running Iran and Iranians don’t want the Iolas so we have to take the nuclear materials from them, don’t you think? I think that’s a perfectly sane thing to do and I don’t see why everyone doesn’t agree on that,” picture, picture, “you know, you should become an actor. You have great presence! That’s what you could do; you could be an actor. Ever thought about that?”“Not really.”“I have to see that Madonna before it closes. First time I saw it, I wept!” picture, “Jesus’ forehead is really tall!” picture, picture, “Jesus Christ!”

Detail from The Ideal City (Città Ideale); Fifteenth-century Central Italian artist (Fra Carnevale?); 1475-1490; oil and tempura on wood.

In the next room, Leonardo’s sketches sit beside Raphael’s. It becomes clear that both artists faced the enormous depth of their task; both confronted the questions of what accurate representation means and what stillness is and how pencils sound against paper and if God is involved how is He involved and when does yellow become gray and all the other meditations painters became better at articulating five hundred years later but, in the meantime, lost a crystalline, almost aquatic freedom which Leonardo paraded by almost becoming an alien and Raphael bypassed by doing yet another Madonna. I stop thinking about this when I find a small, red ochre drawing of a baby who is both bulbously happy and perfectly confused. I smile, laugh, then turn the corner to discover a long hallway. I sit down.In front of me, a man with slick hair explains something to his bored date.About Raphael and the Renaissance, there’s nothing to say that has not been said in dusty green books or tidal-wave-upon-tidal-wave of undergraduate theses. As nearly everyone knows, the bricks and the light and the air of Italy is attractive now and was more attractive then. The idea of waking from the Dark Ages is nice and is made even better when those who do the waking are a coterie of gay men with smooth skin who seemed to have more-or-less enjoyed their desire and didn’t think too much of it until they got caught and, this time, didn’t recognize the judge. Michelangelo feels most guilty; stewing lust can turn marble soft. Meanwhile, Raphael (not gay, apparently) floats on puffs of orgasmic self-confidence, Leonardo is busy, Donatello prances with wry smiles, and Botticelli wears pointy shoes, losing zero sleep over his interest in perky countryside cocks. These are, at least, my impressions of their work. Confirm the biographical details yourself.The bored date yawns and the man with slick hair does not like that.I stand up. I am intimidated by how much more there is and how little time I have before closing so I just want to meet up with my friends and find the man with big black boots. This means I don’t take the time to investigate what might help me answer my question—“where are we?”—but I’m not so sure the paintings offer any clues. It isn’t a place. It’s an abstraction somewhere between ideal and real. The wind is smooth, the water full of fish. City and country blend. No one gets tired by walking long distances. The sun is somehow dimmed, as if it had more life to think about than just Earth’s. This question of background, then, strikes the Renaissance’s core; it strikes the accepted sentiment of their unique realism which causes so many moans of “Oh, how far we’ve fallen!” Because, in truth, Raphael is as abstract as any other great artist. His human beings are ideas of human beings. They are caricatures he learned to draw in a way similar to how Egyptians learned elongated feet and Medievals learned icons. Unique, observed life seeps in via the sketches, but are always eventually subsumed into a larger vision. This is to say Raphael is a poet, and his world is one where grass hums and where no one is bogged down by ugly tasks like shaving your chest or thinking about the future. Raphael’s poetic world is, in fact, sublime.But does that answer anything? Not really. I doubt many believe Italy looked like that, or people were so hydrated. What I’m trying to say is this: Raphael’s perceptive accuracy—his interest in things like the line of a woman’s eye—is done not only to satisfy his half-scientific investigations into human sight and pictorial representation, but also because that sort of precision fits his poetic sensibility. Where other epochs have trusted bodily looseness, the Italian Renaissance believed in geometric rigor. That is, they trusted the feeling of geometric rigor, the aesthetic. I don’t think their dream of rationalism included the desolation of rain forests, nor tax write-offs. This is why one fully realized poetic geography should never be placed above another—it’s unjust to everyone involved.I pass the Madonnas. I feel the touch of her hand upon my back.In the last room, I don’t look at the art. I watch everyone move around, inspect, try. One guy keeps snorting, another holds a paper grocery bag with surprised awe. The only piece I stop at is on the wall beside the exit; it would’ve gone unnoticed had my friend not pointed it out. In a large vertical tapestry, muscle man smashes toward the viewer, a stone chunk taken from the red twirls which surround him. The comment from one couple is “It’s like a comic book.” Correct. How and why Raphael ended up doing tapestries with graphic novel gimmicks is unclear. Maybe wall text explains it, but I don’t want to read it. Instead, I listen to the man with big black boots explain to an elderly couple how “Even though it’s paint, it’s like poetry, you know, with the frame and the gold,” picture, “I’ve been drawing for fifty years and all I get is pain but at least I can come here and feel it’s okay because they were just a bunch of religious nutballs and maybe nuclear war won’t happen,” picture, picture, “maybe it’s going to be alright,” picture, “so, what do you two do?”It’s colder than when we came in. Spring can be deceptive. My group gathers for a cigarette. Our conversation is about the limits of human knowledge.

Workshop of Pieter van Aelst (after a cartoon by Raphael and workshop), detail from Saint Paul in Prison (from the First Edition of the Acts of the Apostles Tapestry Series), 1517-21. Wool, silk, and gilt-metal-wrapped thread tapestry.

Raphael: Sublime Poetry, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, March 29 - June 28, 2026About the Author:
Brock Riggins has written for The Manhattan Art Journal, Ink & Image, Medici Museum of Art, and Micki Meng. He lives in New York and has just finished Autumn Semester, a novel he hopes to be his debut.

Temporal Formalism

May 1, 2026 | by Matthew Herriot

Stanley Whitney, Out East, 2023. Oil on linen, 96 x 96 inches.

Nearly every movement in twentieth-century painting was precipitated by a change in understanding of what a painting is. By changing what painting can be, artists changed what it could express. Picasso and Braque saw one-point perspective as detached from real-world experience; thus, they invented Cubism, a new way of depicting the figure through multiple, shifting viewpoints, closer to a durational experience of seeing. Surrealism treated painting as a means to access the unconscious, often allowing images to emerge outside rational control through techniques like automatism and unexpected juxtaposition, thereby shifting painting from depiction to the staging of psychic experience. Abstract Expressionism treated the canvas as a record of the artist’s physical encounter with the medium; this reframed painting as an existential act in which gesture and scale conveyed human presence within a precarious postwar world. Minimalism shifted attention from painting as illusion to the inherent properties of materials and real space, treating the artwork as an object and heightening perception of its tangible qualities. By redefining the conventions of painting, artists throughout Modernism generated new meanings that resonated with their historical moment.Today, every artist claims a reinvention of painting. Press releases for exhibitions frame each artist as committed to a new understanding of what the medium is. Yet, after Modernism’s drive to map out painting’s possibilities, such reinventions involve increasingly minor distinctions. The major innovations of twentieth-century painting established the broad terms within which artists today still operate, making it difficult for contemporary painters to escape reference to twentieth-century artists who “did it first.”Once you connect a contemporary painting to a past movement, you see its materials and mannerisms as quotations of other artists rather than as creative decisions that carry risk in this moment. This transforms the painting from a visually alive surface into an analysis of genealogy. You might think to yourself: “The painting in front of me is clearly influenced by a particular artist or period from art history, though its use of color or material is slightly different.” This process of analysis and classification is in direct conflict with aesthetic experience—by which I mean close visual observation of a work’s sensory features and their relations for their own sake—because once you name the thing you cease to properly see it.The distinction between these two modes of attention is crucial to understanding what is wrong in contemporary painting. According to aesthetic philosopher Bence Nanay, aesthetic attention occurs when one attends to a wide range of an artwork’s properties at once—such as the relations between colors, forms, textures, and spatial organization. When looking at most ordinary objects, however, our attention is focused on only the properties relevant to some practical goal. Nanay illustrates this with a simple example: imagine you are being attacked by a burglar and, in searching for something to defend yourself with, you glance at a Giacometti sculpture. You are likely to attend only to the features that make it useful for defending yourself, while all other visual qualities recede. This is precisely the structure of attention that classification imposes on our experience of contemporary painting. Given the near-inevitability of stylistic reference, we often look at a contemporary painting with the goal of locating it within a familiar style or movement. This causes our attention to narrow toward only those key, defining properties that confirm or complicate that identification, while subtler particularities, such as any carefully refined color relationships or complex spatial organizations, go unnoticed. The impulse to classify prevents the distributed attention on which aesthetic experience in painting depends.The crisis is not new; it was already felt by many painters by the 1950s. Artists initially solved the problem by making paintings that resisted classification altogether. Lucio Fontana sliced through the canvas, permanently rupturing it. Yves Klein departed from composition and picture-making completely, instead producing works that isolate the pure qualities of his own variant of ultramarine blue. In some cases, resisting classification meant leaving the canvas entirely. Dan Flavin pushed the medium into an expanded field. Through sculptural fluorescent light installations, he reduced painting to light, color, and spatial perception, while abandoning the physical canvas. These artists, among others, violated painting’s core historical properties to such an extent that traditional ways of interpreting painting no longer applied—such as questions of compositional balance, the organization of form, or the construction of an image. These works appear as singular things that must be encountered on their own terms, making stylistic analysis and the kind of classification that leads to perceptual collapse less likely.Attempts to resist classification through rupture no longer work. The most fundamental ways to break painting already occurred decades ago, such that any new rupture today is immediately recognized as a reference to prior ones. Unable to escape historical references through disruption, artists instead rely on the language of radicality in press releases and artist statements, even when it is disconnected from what is visually evident in the work itself. As a result, disruption is invoked conceptually but no longer registers at the level of perception.Critics have described this problem as the “death of painting”, which is always met with strong backlash. The art world revolts—they say that painting will never die because artists will always continue to paint. Both sides of this debate are misguided, but for different reasons. Painting is not dead because everything has been done before; it is in crisis because anything that can possibly be done is acceptable. Since painting no longer has binding rules, viewers no longer share a common set of historically grounded expectations. Without shared expectations, artists have nothing to disrupt. With no disruptions, viewers quickly recognize what they are looking at, and perception closes. This means that painters can continue painting, as they are doing today, but only with a trade-off: few paintings are actually encountered as art. In response, most contemporary painters settle for the illusion of novelty through material gimmicks (using unconventional surfaces or techniques) and inflated language (relocating meaning outside the painting by saying it is about something). The net result is an art world in retreat. Paintings today are experienced as decorative objects with external narratives attached to them. We repeat these narratives to justify making art that is so often perceptually inert.Therefore, when critics say that painting is dead, what they are really registering is the breakdown of aesthetic experience. As contemporary painting increasingly triggers recognition of already-known styles, perception is flattened by classification. The problem, then, is how aesthetic experience can operate under conditions of historical saturation. Instead of searching for ways to address this problem, the postmodern art world largely pivoted toward the conceptual, treating “the aesthetic” as a suspect ideology. This shift was shaped in part by the rejection of earlier theories of aesthetic experience, most notably those of mid-century critic Clement Greenberg.For Greenberg, aesthetic experience was inseparable from value judgment. A successful painting produces an immediate, involuntary sense of satisfaction by introducing a degree of formal surprise. Because this surprise depends on a viewer’s accumulated experience of prior art, Greenberg implied that those most attuned to the best new painting of the moment are better equipped to make accurate aesthetic judgments. Aesthetic evaluation thus takes on a quasi-objective character, in which some judgments carry more authority than others. By tying aesthetic experience to the recognition of the most significant recent developments in painting, Greenberg effectively reduced it to a form of historically conditioned competence, one that privileges certain viewers and pressures artists to align with dominant trajectories. This position has been criticized as elitist, contributing to broader suspicion that aesthetic judgment functions as an instrument of power and exclusion.The art world’s response was to reject not just Greenberg’s account of aesthetic experience but the very act of evaluating art on aesthetic grounds altogether. What was lost in this rejection was the possibility of a more accurate understanding of aesthetic experience. The following offers a revised account of the mechanism by which aesthetic experience occurs in painting, explaining how it was produced throughout Modernism and how painting can remain perceptually alive today. This requires rethinking formalism itself.Aesthetic experience does not depend on possessing “good taste” in any general or historically grounded sense. Rather, it arises through a viewer’s familiarity with the internal development of an artist’s work over time—that is, within the unfolding of a single practice rather than in relation to the broader trajectory of painting. This rewrites formalism from a historically grounded system of judgment to a temporal, experience-based process rooted in perception. Under these conditions, aesthetic experience is conditional and variable: a given painting may or may not generate it depending on the viewer’s prior encounters with that artist’s work.

Ron Gorchov, Left: Spice of Life II, 2017. Oil on linen, 71 1/2 x 102 x 14 1/2 inches.
Right: Milniades, 2018. Oil on linen, 47 1/2 x 55 x 12 1/2 inches.

Thus far I have portrayed repetition as painting’s fatal flaw, yet this account of repetition is incomplete. Under certain conditions, repetition can do the opposite: some artists establish and then undermine repetition to sustain aesthetic experience over time. Consider Stanley Whitney’s practice—we know that every new painting will involve the same stacked, colorful squares. He has built a strong sense of anticipation by repeating a consistent visual motif across decades. But rather than this repetition leading to immediate recognition, it can provide the necessary level of expectation for small deviations to disrupt and reopen perception.Because Whitney usually paints his signature grid of squares in a wide spectrum of colors, often with a handful of intensely vibrant reds, his occasional shift towards cooler, less chromatic tones suddenly challenges recognition: Is this a true Whitney? Does it feel just as aesthetically pleasing, or does it fall flat? By occasionally deviating from his expected output, Whitney leads his audience to feel those risks in real time, asking them to make a judgment on whether the departure succeeds or fails. Hence, rather than simply registering the painting as a “type”, which would close perception, Whitney’s audience maintains a state of ongoing, active perception of the painting’s specific formal properties. In this sense, the expectation and surprise that Clement Greenberg described is retained, but relocated from the level of art history to the level of an individual artist’s practice.This distinction between repetition that closes perception versus repetition that reactivates perception can be demonstrated by comparing the works of Otis Jones and Ron Gorchov. Otis Jones’s paintings consist of roughly circular canvases stapled to layers of plywood of the same shape. Using a variety of muted and pastel colors, while shifting each painting’s curvature, scale, and depth from the wall, Jones’s work offers iterations on the same distinct visual language. But none of these variations venture far outside of his established habits of production; none of them risk displeasure. The first time you see one of his paintings, you might appreciate its novel construction or balanced use of color. The second time you might notice a slightly altered scale and proportions from the first. After the fifth or sixth time, you simply register a painting by a familiar artist, briefly note its signature formal qualities, and then move on without really seeing anything.In contrast, while Ron Gorchov’s shaped canvases likewise appear more as objects than pictures, certain paintings of his dare to break the successful format he spent years cultivating. For instance, his symmetrical composition of two floating shapes is occasionally burst open, leaving only one distorted shape floating at an irregular axis. Other works test the refinement of his surfaces, as he sometimes allowed thin, unfinished-looking washes of color to interrupt the resolved intensity of most other works. Each time Gorchov tests his own parameters, perception is jolted, forcing visual attention to “wake up.” The audience must update their idea of what a successful Gorchov painting looks like. By incrementally shifting expectations in this way, artists can continually evoke aesthetic perception.Most painters find one compelling way of painting and then produce countless variations of it, like Jones did. All their variations roughly amount to the same thing each time, which supports market stability, but is terminal for aesthetic experience. Artists practicing what I will call “temporal formalism,” including Whitney or Gorchov, do not repeat one thing. They repeat the idea of a thing whose form itself is constantly changing, and thus manifests slightly differently in each work. This produces a sequence or development that can be learned and anticipated, only to be occasionally ruptured. By constantly recalibrating the setting and breaking of expectation, temporal formalists renew and prolong perception of each painting’s formal properties. Aesthetic experience varies with the specific painting and each viewer’s prior encounters with the artist’s work, persisting irrespective of painting’s historical saturation.The process at stake can be clarified through the Russian formalist concept of defamiliarization, first articulated by Viktor Shklovsky: making familiar things strange in order to disrupt habitual perception and prolong the act of seeing. Traditionally, defamiliarization in painting operates at the level of representation. An artist takes an ordinary object, scene, or subject and presents it in a strange way, forcing the viewer to slow down and look again. But in contemporary painting, we are already accustomed to seeing endless distortions of the visible world, so defamiliarization no longer works at the level of what is represented. Temporal formalism relocates defamiliarization away from depicted content and onto the level of the painting itself. When an artist establishes a consistent visual language—so that their works become immediately recognizable as theirs—each painting begins to function, for the viewer, like a familiar object. Defamiliarization can then occur at a second order: instead of altering how something is depicted, the artist defamiliarizes their own established visual language by altering its expected structure. In Giorgio Morandi’s still lifes, for example, bottles and vessels eventually cease to register as discrete objects and instead become a familiar abstract configuration; subtle deviations within that configuration then carry the defamiliarizing effect. These occasions of surprise are only possible against the backdrop of a vast body of work in which the artist establishes and maintains a consistent visual baseline.Reframing defamiliarization in this way sharpens the distinction between artists who merely produce variations within a single style and those who practice temporal formalism. In both cases, repetition establishes a recognizable visual signature. The difference is that temporal formalists actively defamiliarize that identifiable signature to reintroduce perception tension. By contrast, artists who remain within predictable iteration always allow recognition to come too easily, causing perception to settle almost immediately.

Giorgio Morandi, Natura Morta, 1963. Oil on canvas, 12x14 inches.

From this perspective, temporal formalism does not depend on viewing an artist’s work in strict chronological order. It only requires a baseline familiarity with the artist’s established visual language, enough to register when it has been altered. Once that baseline familiarity exists, any work can produce a defamiliarizing effect, regardless of when it was made. You might first encounter the mature paintings of Ron Gorchov, where his paired, floating forms appear stable and fully resolved, and only later come across earlier works in which those forms emerge from a looser, more fluid field of shapes. Rather than understanding this as a precursor to his later work, you experience something more perceptually immediate: Gorchov’s familiar motif rendered suddenly unfamiliar. The expected configuration has been disrupted, even though the temporal sequence has been reversed. This reversal demonstrates that defamiliarization, as it operates within temporal formalism, is not tied to the linear progression of an artist’s practice but to the viewer’s own sequence of encounters that build and disrupt familiarity.This perspective on defamiliarization also explains why a complete break from an artist’s established visual language does not generate the same level of aesthetic attention. If a painting bears no recognizable relation to prior work, it cannot function as a “familiar object made strange,” and the specific tension that sustains aesthetic attention dissipates. For this reason, artists can shift their methods across their career while still practicing temporal formalism within particular bodies of work, as in the abstract paintings of Philip Guston in the 1950s or the Ocean Park series of Richard Diebenkorn, where continuity and disruption operate together to sustain perception.Using temporal formalism as a framework for understanding aesthetic experience is supported by recent research in cognitive science. In their 2011 paper “Putting Reward in Art,” Van de Cruys and Wagemans argue that aesthetic pleasure arises precisely from this dynamic: a painting establishes strong expectations—often through repetition or familiarity—and then introduces a violation that produces a “prediction error.” This error must be neither too small nor too large. If the work is entirely predictable, perception becomes automatic and unrewarding; if it is too unpredictable, the viewer cannot resolve it and disengages. The optimal case lies in between, where the viewer initially experiences the prediction error as a form of resistance, and must exert some effort to reconcile the discrepancy. The eventual reduction of that prediction error generates a sense of reward. Both the Russian formalist concept of defamiliarization and this account of prediction error locate aesthetic experience in the disruption of an established pattern rather than in any static property of the work itself. Through this lens, artists practicing temporal formalism effectively construct and modulate the viewer’s expectations over time, calibrating deviations so that each work demands renewed perceptual engagement.Temporal formalism clarifies how aesthetic experience operated within Modernism’s drive toward reinvention, and, in doing so, how it remains possible under conditions of historical saturation. If aesthetic experience depended on each artist breaking from a set of expectations defined by prior art—as in Greenberg’s account—then why do past historical works continue to produce aesthetic experience today, in a new context? We experience historical works aesthetically not because we recognize their formal achievement in hindsight, but because those artists were simultaneously setting and breaking conventions within their own practices. A visit to the Musée Matisse in Nice, France, demonstrates this. As his work moves from his earlier paintings through his interior scenes in the south, then to his larger, flattened canvases, and finally to his paper cut-outs, each distinct phase establishes its own visual language and internal set of expectations, which are tested and disrupted within each phase. Viewers arriving without an art-historical background still experience these disruptions in the present moment of looking. That is how work made over a century ago remains perceptually alive. However, temporal formalism does not require an extensive museum visit or encyclopedic knowledge of an artist’s work to operate. A few encounters, whether in a single exhibition or scattered across time, are enough to build the familiarity on which defamiliarization depends.If temporal formalism describes something real, then the question becomes why it hasn’t yet been recognized. Part of the answer is economic. Painters who repeat their signature style without risking it perform well in the market by delivering a stable, predictable product. When a gallery’s program and the livelihoods of dealers and curators depend on the consistent output of recognizable artists, there is little incentive to distinguish between repetition that reactivates perception and repetition that collapses it.A second reason is that temporal formalism can be difficult to identify. Even the framework’s exemplar painters—such as Richard Diebenkorn or Robert Ryman—do not always achieve it, and when they do not, their work can be hard to distinguish from iterative variation. Moreover, the formal sensibilities of artists practicing temporal formalism vary so widely that there appears to be no common denominator. Alex Katz’s work is considerably different from Agnes Martin’s, for example. This makes it easier to conclude that each artist simply pursues an individual vision. It is harder to identify the condition that generates perceptual reward across such distinct practices. But this variability is, in fact, a strength of the framework. Temporal formalism prescribes nothing about what a painting should look like. It only requires a rigorous commitment to a developing formal language, combined with a willingness to disrupt it. This is less a directive than a description of what the best painters already know intuitively.The deeper resistance to recognizing temporal formalism, however, is institutional. As aesthetic-based theories of painting became unfashionable in the latter half of the twentieth century, art criticism moved away from evaluative judgment toward descriptive, contextual readings, thus avoiding hierarchies of taste. Temporal formalism reintroduces an evaluative dimension that cuts against more than fifty years of institutional consensus, even though that evaluative dimension is grounded in individual encounters rather than historically conditioned expertise. It is telling that the most direct research in this area has come from outside the art world. It comes from philosophy, in Nanay’s work on aesthetic attention, and from cognitive science, in Van de Cruys and Wagemans’s account of prediction error. Meanwhile, painters have continued to practice it implicitly, indifferent to whether criticism supplied a theoretical framework.Temporal formalism ultimately reframes the terms of painting’s supposed crisis. Critics who declare painting dead are responding to the collapse of historical novelty as the engine of aesthetic experience. But painting’s capacity for aesthetic experience was located elsewhere all along, in the cumulative relationship between a viewer and an individual artist’s developing practice: the slow building of familiarity, and its periodic rupture. By shifting the relevant axis from historical to temporal, this framework identifies the conditions under which a painting is more or less likely to produce aesthetic experience. In doing so, it explains why most contemporary paintings fall flat while some retain aesthetic vitality despite the exhaustion of historical novelty. Naming this mechanism clarifies what the best painters already do in practice, and what criticism, in retreating from aesthetic experience, lost the language to articulate.

About the Author:
Matthew Herriot is a British artist living and working in Chicago.
mattherriot.com

Why Paint?

April 12, 2026 | by Candice T. Seymour

Recently Diva Corp posted on Instagram

It’s 2026, you’re an artist, you can do anything… Why paint?

knowing, of course, the question would provoke responses both fanatical and flippant. Putting the substance of Diva’s question aside for now, it was briefly entertaining to compare the comments of worked-up painters with the paintings they posted, to see whether paintings made by writers of woo-woo justifications were vaguely mystical, those of the politically oriented were rhetorical, and those of the pedantic, academic—in short, to see whether there was any coherence between claim and work. The novelty of this comparative study wore off before I discovered any such coherence and my doomscrolling, thinly veiled as research, left me disappointed by predictable comments and predictable paintings, impatient with the discrepancy between what the painters claimed about painting and the so-called works they put their names on—an impatience familiar to any gallery-goer in the form of the gap between the claims made by press releases about paintings and what the paintings themselves are actually doing (or, what is more often the case, failing to do).This gap between press release and painting—and our complacency—no, our expectation of it, is a symptom of what can only be a shared suspicion that painting is on its own incapable of expressing anything relevant to the time we live in.Words, we thus feel, are necessary to explain what a painting is about, to clue us into the relevant context, conceptual framework, underlying “research,” artistic intentions, etc., etc., etc., without which, we seem to worry, we would find ourselves staring blankly at colored paste spread across a surface.

Doron Langberg, HaEmek, 2025, Oil on linen, 96 x 240 inches.

How, after all, could I know that this otherwise inoffensive landscape painting actually “[makes] visible the violence” of Israelis against Palestinians if I didn’t read the accompanying essay? Well—I couldn’t, because it doesn’t actually make it visible if words are needed to explain it.After spending more time reading the essay than looking at all of the paintings cummulatively, the chasm between claim and art object gapes so wide one can’t help but feel that the gallery must think us schmucks if they expect us to believe that a painting of a patch of shrubs, perfect for the wall of a millionaire’s living room, can make visible what two and a half years of on-the-ground footage of unbelievable atrocities can’t seem to succeed in making us see. All due respect to the artist’s struggle to understand their history, their contingency, and the implications of the moral revelations they’ve undergone over the past years. But the work on view does not do the work they claim it does.In the face of such impotence, it’s no wonder that critics repeat the cry—“From today, painting is dead!”—first uttered in 1839 by Paul Delaroche upon seeing a photograph of the man whose portrait he was laboring over, announced again in 1958 by Allan Kaprow after Jackson Pollock’s literal death, argued again in 1981 by Douglas Crimp at painting’s seeming resurrection after the conceptual production of the 60s and 70s. Each proclamation, though similar in form, makes a different claim, grounded in different assumptions, different definitions of art and painting. Delaroche’s presumption that painting’s end was mimesis meant that photography made it technically obsolete. Kaprow’s understanding that painting’s end is expression meant that there was no reason for art to be limited by the conventions of fine art. Crimp’s belief that modernism was over meant that painting ought to be seen for what it really is, namely, paint applied to a support essentially no different from that applied to facades and signs, save the ideological support of galleries and museums.Today, the charge is repeated by Diva. And by you, too, if you managed to snag a Why paint? shirt from the Diva Corp merch store before it sold out, Diva’s call for new forms (all comments included) printed in minuscule text on a white tee—an expression, in the characteristic quasi-irony of whatever stage of capitalism we’re in, of our sense that we, as a culture and society, are stuck.

Challenges to content are terminal and easily reduced – that was clear last decade. They fit neatly into the neoliberal regimes you guys love to hate: Quotas can be met, “evolution” pointed to… and the sale can still be made.Challenges to form, however, have no end. (Thinking of Callois’ distinction, here, between play and games). With each challenge comes another… until that becomes the norm. Break form enough and prismatic shifts will follow.

I sympathize. Only something dead would require as much verbal scaffolding as these paintings do to convince us they’re animate.But this sense of art’s unvitality and the symptomatic gap between words and work is not peculiar to painting as a medium, as Diva claims it to be in their Insta-essay, which hinges on a facile distinction between form and content (a weak hinge, indeed, as we’ll see later). Gallerinas across the country hand out multi-page press releases “about” works of all media, whether “traditional” or “new”: veritable five-paragraph essays, single-spaced and in 12-point font, peppered with vague verbs (explores, delves, interrogates, questions, subverts, analyzes, expresses) and abstract nouns (society, culture, gender, oppression, convention, late capitalism, the post-digital/-modern/-human/etc.)—a whole lotta verbal machinery intended to convince us (and, we suspect, themselves) that the artwork is actually doing something.—And, in their desperate attempt to convince, acknowledging that it, indeed, does not.The sense that art is impotent knows no medium-specific bounds.So, Painters, forgive us when we use your medium as an exemplar of a pervasive impotence. It’s an easy target because so close to mere luxury good and so often allowed by its maker to collapse into commodity. Know that it’s not you, it’s us—all of us. Including you. If art is to remain vital, the gap between what is said about it and what it does in experience must be closed. This is not a problem of medium, but of form—two terms too often confused—but we need some grounding in particular artworks before we can leap to this level of the discussion.—I fell, so to speak, into such a chasm while visiting Cynthia Daignault’s show Denali at Olney Gleason last month—an exemplary symptom of a failed faith in painting, unacknowledged and untreated. It exemplifies how anxiety about painting’s relevance can manifest in externalities like conceptual strategies and press releases, without, however, allowing that anxiety to become a productive element in the work itself (which would be the only way to actually make a painting that is vitally relevant to contemporary life).

View of Cynthia Daignault: Denali, at Olney Gleason, New York, 2026.

The image of a snowy mountain was repeated across most of the pieces in the show in a variety of media: painting, photography, a 3D topographical model. The non-painting objects seemed mere accessories, overshadowed by the paintings, the largest of which was an array of nearly three hundred 10 x 10-inch canvases organized into a 10 x 20-foot grid depicting a mountain. One gets the sense that Daignault just wanted to daub paint on a canvas, but, suspecting (if not acknowledging this suspicion) that such daubing is not enough to make a painting today, resorted to conceptual strategies: external frameworks that inform the painting without being reciprocally informed by act of painting itself—producing, in short, sophisticated paint-by-numbers. A large painting is constructed out of small square canvases, like a grand Instagram grid or photo album. The same image is reproduced across different canvases, slight material differences asserting the individuality of paintings in contrast to identically reproducible digital images. Brushstrokes are left unblended, retaining their individuality as the painterly correlate to pixels. Why these paintings are of mountains is unclear. Any digital image would have sufficed, so unnecessary is the connection between how they’re made and what they’re of.This thorough conceptualization chops up the artwork, which is nothing if not a unity, into what might lazily be called a content (the image of a mountain, arbitrary because it could be swapped with any image of anything) and a form (the conventions of painting modified by digital analogy).A distinction alien to artworks—for art works only when there is no distinction between form and content, when what the work is about is what the work is doing (which by no means requires that art has to be about art). The “form” proper to an artwork is so intertwined with its “content” that it can’t be separated from it.But when grasping for words to describe such failures, it’s understandable to turn to such a familiar but unexamined distinction as that between form and content, the visible object and what it’s allegedly about. This distinction seems adequate precisely because we’re so used to the gap between the object and what the artist or gallery claims it’s doing. We take them at their word that the content is something that we can’t get from the object and is therefore distinct from its physical form. So we understand why a critic who wants more from art, like Diva, who clearly hasn’t articulated to themselves what a form is, would, upon experiencing so many bad paintings (they abound), conflate form with medium. The erroneous stepis thus taken: all, or at least most, paintings are impotent, therefore painting must be incapable of making vital forms.It is clear that you can’t have a form without the medium in which the form is realized. But it is just as clear that you can have the latter, a specific medium, without the former, a form—that any medium can fail to produce a vital form, in which case, it fails to be an artwork.As is the case with Daignault’s paintings. The paintings themselves presuppose that painting is a generic form that gets filled with arbitrary content. The content, in this case, a mountain, which, when we turn to the press release (as we always do when a show is disappointing), we are told is Denali (a.k.a. Mount McKinley):

“meaning ‘The Great One’, is the highest peak in North America and a contested symbol of American exceptionalism, white supremacy, and frontier mythology. The mountain also stands as a grand reminder to the existential threat of climate change, a theme which weaves throughout the show. As Arctic regions are warming at a rate four times faster than the global average, the mountain is simultaneously a symbol of our country’s majestic wilderness and of its impending collapse.”

…I envy you, Reader, who can chuckle safely behind your screen at these absurd claims. Scoffs, let me tell you, reverberate loudly in the cavernous space of that gallery, making it a tempting place to let echo the cry that is always on the tip of my tongue when I taste such baloney: that this is proof, indeed, that painting is dead.But I swallowed it. For I have seen contemporary paintings that are alive, and paintings from the past that retain their vitality. It doesn’t matter that most painting—most art of any medium—is mediocre, nothing, mere decoration, academic pretension, rhetoric, illustration, nonsense. Good art is always an exception.What is dead, however, is symbolism, and with it the fantasy that meaning in an artwork can be grasped immediately through mere visual images. We—those of us who belong, however begrudgingly, to the cosmopolitan artworld—do not live in a world of symbolic thought. Ours is not a tightly-knit social structure of shared assumptions, the ground that allows an image to function as a symbol that directly communicates another idea.An image is not a symbol if its meaning has to be explained in a press release. A few sentences cannot make a painting of a mountain about white supremacy.The Reader won’t be surprised that an artist as inclined to letting words do the work as Daignault would respond verbosely to an inflammatory post like Diva Corp’s—but they may be surprised, as I was, by the terms the painter used. A new chasm opens up. In contrast to the quasi-conceptual angle of the press release, with its claims about the digital, environmental, and social, Daignault’s “hard respectful disagree” to Diva’s denunciation of painting conjures a numinous picture of the undertaking:

‘Painting’ is a sacred human practice present across every world culture since the very beginning of human history, in all cultures at all times. To engage in a practice as primal as sex or picking berries is to join the long flow of human thought history. I reject your false capitalist notion of “progress” (bigger, better, new!) in favor of a sacred practice routed [sic] in universal humanism. A practice at its core about the bonding of consciousness and body - eye and hand.

The “primal” “practices” of sex and berry picking didn’t, I don’t think, need press releases to make their meanings clear (though humankind might have benefited if we had one explaining the former). Even to one, like myself, who grew up in the city and has never picked a berry, the intention behind such an undertaking is evident—namely, to procure food for necessity or pleasure. In contrast, what would the intelligibility of Daignault’s paintings become in the “long flow of human thought history” if the press release explaining that these depictions of a mountain are actually about white supremacy were ever lost? Without the words that provide their content, they would be revealed as formless, mere artifacts of human activity, of anthropological, not artistic, interest.Prehistoric cave painters didn’t need press releases to explain their work, even if we, in our non-symbolic mode of life so alien to theirs, wish they’d left them for us when we anachronistically project our understanding of art onto them. We do not know the so-called content of Altamura cave paintings and because of this—because the two are not separate—we don’t know their form. The interest we can take in these so-called paintings is anthropological, not artistic.It is worth asking, as does one of the aforementioned proclaimers of painting’s death: what enables us to say that a cave painting, a 17th-century court painting, and an abstract expressionist canvas all belong to the same category? These very different objects can be grouped together only if we understand painting as a transhistorical, medium-specific undertaking, an essence that is modulated only superficially over time by styles and technological developments. It is this picture of painting that allows Diva to conflate medium with form.But, nearly fifty years after it was asked, the question, rather than proving, as the theoretical pallbearer had hoped, the necessary irrelevance of painting, shows that once we’ve accepted that these painted objects are so different, we need not group them together as belonging to an artistically relevant category. So today I proclaim:Painting as an artistic category is irrelevant. We don’t care about its development or lack thereof, its transhistorical relevance or lack thereof. All we care about is the creation of new forms.It is more than clear that not all paintings succeed in producing new forms. But it is just as clear, by their dependence on press releases and our dissatisfaction with them, that so-called artworks in other media don’t necessarily succeed in producing new forms. In a time when art can be in any medium, we must recognize that the achievement of a new form is more complicated.A work that fails to become a new form doesn’t merely reproduce a dated form: it fails to achieve form at all.I’m not going to pretend to solve the form/content problem that has plagued philosophies and theories, it seems, since their beginning. I offer only a provisional definition of an artistic form, a starting point so we can begin to free ourselves from the deadlock of form/content optimism/despair, one that gives artists, viewers, and critics alike the traction to keep moving forward:An artistic form is an artwork: a singular individual that struggles toward coherence within itself, growing out of and surpassing the initial givens—generic and therefore open to unknown possibilities—of medium, time, and place. They are syntactic: coherences inseparable from the relation of parts to whole, indivisible into false dichotomies like form and content. There are as many artworks as there are forms. And there are many things called artworks that are not because they fail to achieve their form.With this picture of form, Diva’s call for new forms, in its generic medium-specificity, starts to look like a wish for a symbol, some visual element of an artwork that immediately communicates the idea of newness—a picture of newness beholden to a dated picture of a public shocked by abstract art or a urinal. But in an age where anything goes, when we don’t share assumptions about art except that it can be anything, such symbolic communication is not our fate.Communication today is not symbolic: implicit, condensed, based on shared assumptions. It is syntactic: elaborated, explicit, its articulation and reception not given. The communication and grasping of meaning must be worked for. New forms, too, must be elaborated and syntactic. Their creation and reception must be worked out by both maker and viewer: given interpretations overcome, parts related to a whole that only gradually comes into view, meaning discovered. After all, we don’t just want the idea of newness—we want new forms.The step away from death for art in general, toward form, must be taken step-by-step. As artists work to make forms (which must be done anew with each artwork), as we learn to see them (which must be done with each viewing), we may find ourselves working toward a shared, better form of life. The only way out is through.None of this should be taken as a comfort for painters, nor any other type of artist, nor any critic. We all have a lot of work to do. As Diva says,

We’ve got miles to go before we sleep.





About the Author:
Candice T. Seymour lives and works in New York. Her essays have been published in Caesura and Perseity.

Substack

On the Incoherence of Eric Bayless-Hall’s “Sense of Meaning”
A Letter to the Editor

From Daran Mousý, April 3, 2026
Re: Reflections from a Dead End, Flora Yukhnovich’s Four Seasons at The Frick by Eric Bayless-Hall

To the Editor of Perseity Art Review,I’ll keep it brief. In his recent review of Flora Yukhnovich’s Four Seasons Eric Bayless-Hall makes a few remarks about meaning. First, and most generally, he writes that “a work is meaningful which we want to keep attending to, turning and returning to.” (Elsewhere he suggests that we are never done perceiving such things.) He goes on to criticize Yukhnovich’s work for not rewarding our attention. Here’s the full passage, with relevant parts in bold:

The most promising thought is that the outgrowth and interplay of forms in Four Seasons might become an image of the organic itself—that the abundance might not be abundance merely, that the discovery of forms in the thicket of shapes might be more than a game of recognition in a crowd, that the painter’s interest in paint’s suggestiveness might come to more than the sense—which by itself is not confirmed to be more than the hallucination—of meaning. You see, if all this painting has to offer is its abundance of stuff to look at, and that looking doesn’t coincide with any deepening or broadening of one’s sense of it, then we are to conclude that it is just a dead end to enter once. And at that point it is just a pretty wallpaper or background, to be grouped with the Edge observation deck, not the Frick’s masterpieces. At that point—though I never thought I’d say it—why not let people take pictures?

There is an obvious tension and a less-than-obvious emptiness in Bayless-Hall’s notion of meaning here: on the one hand, meaning is something that deepens and broadens—this goes hand-in-hand with his earlier formulation that meaning is that on account of which we keep attending to something. On the other hand, the sense of meaning is not confirmed to be more than the hallucination of meaning. And here’s where I think Bayless-Hall has no resources to spell out just what the difference would be, or what could make the difference, between meaning and the hallucination of meaning. For telling the difference would require arriving at something, some criterion for meaning or meaningfulness, the absence or presence of which would determine whether a given case is a hallucination of meaning or the real thing. And the discovery of such a criterion is precisely what he has made impossible by saying that the meaningful thing is what we are never done attending to. We will, it seems, never find out whether we weren’t hallucinating the meaning of the work. We will die sooner than finish looking. This is—correct me if I’m wrong—straightforwardly absurd.

Manner and Technique
Noel de Lesseps’ Twilight Chymical Conjunction at Entrance

March 14, 2026 | by Anna Gregor

Noel de Lesseps, Arc en ciel, 2024. Oil on linen, 16 x 20 inches.

“He’s completely self-taught. He’ll just get obsessed with a technique and delve deeper and deeper into it.”—or some such malarkey was overhead at the opening of Noel de Lesseps’ exhibition at Entrance, likely pitched over and over again to prospective collectors throughout the evening.What “techniques” de Lesseps delves into, and what depths he reaches, is not immediately apparent in the paintings in the show, which are generally painted flatly and dryly with little medium or variation in application, their palettes within a narrow range of slightly more or less desaturated color. But it’s not a lack of technique or artistic “training” that moves me to write about this show over any of the other middling painting shows I saw that night, many of which exhibited some degree of “technique,” as the term is generally used. It is, rather, the pretension that being “self-taught” is, firstly, at all extraordinary in today’s artworld and, secondly, that such a self-taught state of the artist inherently imbues an otherwise predictable product with meaning. De Lesseps’ branding as self-taught (whether his choice of adjective or some gallerist’s who saw its pitch potential and planted it in his bio) is a mere rehashing of the romantic fetishization of the “primitive” that modernists get so much flack for, translated into a less offensive term and applied to the 21st century Bushwick Boy™, the New York City artworld’s imaginary primitive: naïve, unrepressed, directly expressive, and somehow closer to nature than those of us hemmed in by convention.The truth is, today every true artist must be self-taught. Admittedly, this formulation misleads, placing, as it does, the emphasis on the person who made the work rather than on the artworks themselves. Better: Every true artwork is a self-teaching.Visit almost any MFA program. The supposedly trained students have likely never completed the exercises we imagine artistic training to entail (say, mixing a scale of chromatic greys from complementary colors or learning how to sight with a pencil while drawing observationally). And if an odd student chanced to have gone to an undergraduate program that hadn’t deskilled its curriculum (whether the curriculum committee was motivated by a romantic picture of direct expression or were simply resentful of the training they had to endure without seeing any use for it), the MFA candidate has probably forgotten it all by now. Such training is no longer a prerequisite for making art. (“My kid could do that!”) This is not news. Ryman made Twin, the all-white painting in MoMA’s collection, sixty years ago. Considering that a urinal bought on 5th Avenue has been considered art for at least as long, there is no reason that an art student must learn (traditional, Western European) techniques (but, likewise, no necessity that they shouldn’t). Twin, although it is just white paint applied to cotton duck, taught Ryman, and teaches a viewer, how much there is to see in what we first thought to be an “empty” painting—and it does so itself (not because wall plaques never tire of telling us that Ryman was a trained jazz musician) in how the paint is applied by hand with a single flat brush at a specific angle, how a thread-thick border of canvas remains unpainted at the turning edge, how the corners are folded like a pinwheel: every decision matters. So each artist must teach themselves, must learn the technique proper to each painting every time they paint.It doesn’t matter whether they avoided an institutionalized art education altogether, or attended Parsons (where they, like myself, would have received absolutely no training in anything other than late 1990s art-theoretical jargon), or studied at a more traditional school like The New York Academy of Art or the Grand Central Atelier (which nominally teach technique by imposing academic restraints on painting through a specific manner of drawing, color theory, and paint manipulation). In a time when anything can be art (but clearly not everything is) there can be no technical givens. Making an artwork entails surpassing what has been received rotely, overcoming one’s education and/or lack thereof. Being self-taught is the necessary condition of artists today and in no way means that those without a so-called art education are closer to direct expression (that romantic hallucination) because (supposedly) not corrupted by the imposition of conventional techniques.“Technique” in art is not a mere mode of manipulating matter. That is the type of technique proper to an assembly line (which accounts for why someone might, mistakenly but understandably, take an absence of technical training to be promising in an artist). But technique, in an artistic sense, must be expanded to mean something closer to discovery: the discovery of coherence that arises when matter and mind form and inform each other until part is related to whole in a way that the artist couldn’t have predicted the piece before it was finished. In art, any mode of manipulating material that is not this special kind of artistic technique is mannerism: pretension to meaning through the repetition of what were once, maybe, in other hands, significant relations, settling for an old, cold, coherence rather than a new one. Its product looks like art, but is not. It’s merely in the manner of art (which—good news for galleries!—doesn’t mean it won’t sell).

Noel de Lesseps, Little light, 2025. Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches.

In art, the opposite of “self-taught” is not “technically trained” (as the overheard quote that ignited this essay presupposes) but “mannered.” A painting can be in the manner of one who is “self-taught”, in the style of naïveté, as in the case de Lesseps’. But this is the opposite of self-taught, in an artistic sense. Paintings made by a truly “primitive” native of the 21st century, untainted by fine artistic conventions (were we to buy the romantic’s picture of expression), would surely produce works that look more like fanart or memes than the influences of Klee, Kandinsky, and Miro present in Lessep’s palettes and compositions (modernists who themselves were working in the manner of children, cave painters, and asylum patients, and whose work is only successful when it overcomes these mannerisms and, far from reverting to some primitive mode of expression, discovers new coherences in the process of making). Unless an artwork is a discovery, it is not an artwork. When nothing is learned (by artist or viewer) the painting is dead.“Self-taught” is a term applied to the empirical person Noel de Lesseps in bio or spiel, but what does that do to our viewing experience? Their surfaces are not that nice, but not unsettling enough to keep looking (it is difficult to make an unsettling painting in the way that Klee’s surfaces so often manage); the surreal-ish scenes of figures with their dicks out amidst Kandinsky-ish landscapes are kind of charming, but give rise to neither narrative nor formal significance; the scenes are full of juxtapositions of esoteric objects and symbols, but none relate to the others to give rise to significance worth spending much time on—not because, as the press release claims, “Characters engage and questions arise, but not to be answered,” but, conversely, because little engages and few questions arise (hence the need to qualify that the artist is “self-taught”).And, if it lightens the blow of this essay, I admit that there are inklings of true self-education in a few of the paintings. Take Appearance (2025). The color choices are odd (it is difficult to make that ultramarine violet work in any painting, but especially next to the dull intensity of chromium oxide green and cadmium orange), yet the compression of striation and patch, the mutual repellence of light and dark values in top and bottom halves respectively, the stacking of space, the visual dismemberment of the giant bunny… somehow hold it together. It is a reminder that we need not brand ourselves as self-taught, because that is the surest way to stunt our own education (that ever-continuing self- and other-education that an artist must commit to to even attempt to make art at all).

Noel de Lesseps, Appearance, 2025. Oil on linen, 24 x 30 inches.

Noel de Lesseps, Twilight Chymical Conjunction, Entrance, 48 Ludlow Street, NYC, Ground & Lower Level. March 12 – April 18, 2026.About the Author:
Anna Gregor is a painter who occasionally writes about Paintings. Her essays can be read in The Revenant Quarterly, Caesura, and Two Coats of Paint.

Reflections from a Dead End
Flora Yukhnovich’s Four Seasons at The Frick

February 19, 2026 | by Eric Bayless-Hall

Flora Yukhnovich, The Four Seasons: Summer, 2025 © Flora Yukhnovich. Photo: Joseph Corsica Jr.

“How much finer things are in composition than alone. ’Tis wise in man to make cabinets.” – Emerson’s Journal, July 13, 1833.A cabinet is queer sort of thing, no?—a dead end in which we place and leave and later find things, whose grouping can appear at once accidental and, in flashes, overwhelmingly necessary. The making of cabinets I first took Emerson to be referring to was not that noble craft of woodwork but rather the arrangement of things within one—the making of as it were a mere cabinet into a cabinet, say, of curiosities, or of natural history, as the Cabinet of Natural History in Paris which occasioned the above quoted note, where he had seen gathered together so many organic and inorganic forms. His entry continues:

Here we are impressed with the inexhaustible riches of nature. The universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever as you glance along this bewildering series of animated forms,—the hazy butterflies, the carved shells, the birds, beasts, fishes, insects, snakes, and the upheaving principle of life everywhere incipient in the very rock aping organized form. Not a form so grotesque, so savage, nor so beautiful but is an expression of some property inherent in man the observer,—an occult relation between the very scorpions and man. I feel the centipede in me,—cayman, carp, eagle, and fox. I am moved by strange sympathies; I say continually “I will be a naturalist.”

The experience reported, I want to insist, is the discovery of the observer’s relation to his environment—to the things we call living and nonliving that one shares the world with—and that this discovery coincides with, or simply is, the discovery of order where mere amalgam seemed to be, an order—organization, formation, composition—which, importantly, includes the observer.—Not, in other words, an order we somehow impose onto variety, but an organization which composes us, our organism, and into which we will decompose.That this discovery takes place in a cabinet is worth dwelling on—that this encounter with (let’s call it) nature (one’s own and one’s environment’s) was arranged by human hands. This, I think, helps us to understand why “’tis wise in man to make cabinets.” We are wont, I think, to think of nature as expansive and ever-open, infinite and inexhaustible, something we might enter and be swallowed by—or else plunder and be rewarded by. But this is a strange picture if we, indeed, are animals and so are, quite literally, never—really—apart from nature. We forget that our view of it is always a view within it. But this means we, at least—we humans—are required to meet the world within human limits too, for these are animal limits. (And the denial of those limits coincides with the denial of it as our environment, what we turn within.) We can meet it, no doubt, outdoors, but not, as it were, outmind. Experience is sometimes pictured as a play on a stage of the mind;—here we can picture experience as the shifting contents of a cabinet: everything encountered coming in and going out of the room we inhabit. But then this is metaphorical, and Emerson seems literal: ’tis wise in man to make cabinets—as though we aren’t given enough in our experience, or don’t see enough of what’s given. And here I think we can hear him to say not merely ’tis wise to arrange things within a cabinet, but ’tis wise to make the cabinet itself: that making a space is a first step toward making an arrangement, and is the step that acknowledges our limits, which, rather than closing us in, reveals the obverse angles of nature’s surrounding presence. We might hear this as something of a naturalist’s justification, or rediscovery, of the indoors.And there are lines to follow out here on how and where nature and art touch.But I bring this all up in light of a cabinet no one wants to be in.Flora Yukhnovich’s Four Seasons fills four sides of The Frick’s Cabinet, formerly home to Boucher’s The Arts and Sciences. If you came into this cabinet, did a lap, and left—as all do, since no photographs are allowed and there’s no other way out—you might talk yourself into thinking there is meaning there. But, of course, you left, and don’t care to go back and find out.I think we are liable to confuse ourselves about what meaning is and isn’t, and so insist on it where it isn’t and deny it where it is. Part of this is no doubt owed to a genuine mystery. But I say baldly, but not blithely, that a work is meaningful which we want to keep attending to, turning and returning to. And this wanting is not a matter of words alone—of saying you want to—but of caring to and, opportunities availing, continuing to. The great works of art—the works that compose our personal canons (personal cabinets), that act as touchstones for the great—are those we are never done seeing or reading or hearing (etc.). (I take this to be definitional of a great work of art, not an accident to one.) So the promises that Four Seasons makes are promises to continue rewarding attention. Instead, however, and I say this without denying the pleasantness of its painterly moments, we find abundance covering over a deeper lack. Many forms will certainly take longer to see than fewer, but that doesn’t change the fact of their finitude, that once you see every inch of the canvas, you’ve seen all there is to see.But I’ve almost neglected to discuss the work. What’s promising in it? And what fails?On each wall is a landscape scene a la ’30s Disney™ backgrounds overlaid with an abundance of forms, some recognizable as flowers, fruits, trees, birds, beasts, and others suggestive of forms we aren’t quite able to identify—most, nevertheless, with a couple curious exceptions, suggestive of the organic: roundnesses, drips, pools, scratchy patches—suggestive, though we’re not always sure what of. Some of what is painted takes time to see. Amid so much information, discovering the few humanesque forms is not immediate. And, though I do not feel the centipede in me, this is promising. Why? Because there’s more than one thought was there—more to look at—and first impressions, though hard to shake, too often tell us more about ourselves than about the work. So we attend.

Four Seasons: Spring and Summer © Flora Yukhnovich. Photo: Joseph Corsica Jr.

The second promising step this work invites is to have us look at the paint. Yukhnovich is evidently skilled with the medium. A surprising variety of technique goes into the making of these forms and always in a way revealing of the strokes. This is presumably what is meant when the work is described as being “contemporary abstraction” (a phrase we’ll want to come back to): standing an arm’s distance from almost any stretch of canvas we find strokes growing out of one another, suggestive of organism, sometimes becoming full fledged flowers or deer.But where does this lead? What does it promise? First, that there is something to see. And that something, if this is to be more than a game of I Spy™, is not just anything, but something worth seeing. (The work is taken on trust when its worthiness isn’t immediate. Many of the best aren’t; so this is all promising, as far as it goes.) But though the painter has an eye and hand for the pleasing paint mark, this doesn’t reward looking any more (in fact, less) than the Snow White backgrounds they resemble (and even less than the Bouchers they vaguely ape).The most promising thought is that the outgrowth and interplay of forms in Four Seasons might become an image of the organic itself—that the abundance might not be abundance merely, that the discovery of forms in the thicket of shapes might be more than a game of recognition in a crowd, that the painter’s interest in paint’s suggestiveness might come to more than the sense—which by itself is not confirmed to be more than the hallucination—of meaning. You see, if all this painting has to offer is its abundance of stuff to look at, and that looking doesn’t coincide with any deepening or broadening of one’s sense of it, then we are to conclude that it is just a dead end to enter once. And at that point it is just a pretty wallpaper or background, to be grouped with the Edge observation deck, not the Frick’s masterpieces. At that point—though I never thought I’d say it—why not let people take pictures?But one’s disappointment is relevant to criticism only to the extent that it is explained by the work. So what is responsible for what I called this work’s deeper lack?

Four Seasons: Winter (Detail) © Flora Yukhnovich. Photo: Joseph Corsica Jr.

I find a clue in the painting’s human forms—humanoid is more appropriate, since they are rough and more of the Barbie™ than the animal kingdom—painted in ways similar to other figures, but consistently more sketchily and incompletely than other organic objects. At first this suggested the (promising) idea of humans as no larger part of this environment than peaches and pansies, which I hoped would lead to a thought of what an environment according to this painting is—and, seeing as it depicts (kind of) the four seasons and actually encloses you, this promised to bring several strands of observation together. (Hence I was led back to Emerson, and wished to stay there.) But this thought hits a dead end in the fact that these humans are fantastical: almost elvish creatures astride bunnies and moose-like beasts more at home in Narnia than Central Park. What promised—to my ears—to be a picture of the natural world that we are outgrowths of, proves on closer inspection to be heedless of reality.Parodying Johnson, the late William Aile said that it is easy to achieve the pleasurable once you have abandoned the real. We might add: and if the pleasurable starts to seem like a high bar, the fantastical is even easier. And lest I insult those who aim to express—as our time is in need of expressing—the fucky fact of fantasy in modern life, let me clarify the scope of my criticism. Four Seasons, if it has wished to reflect on fantastical forms as part of our environment, fails to begin to do so, for these elements are only inchoate. And if I’m right that what this painting wishes to express are possibilities of reality and the human organism in relation to its environment, then it fails to get there, and the swerve to the fantastical is a dodge. In an age characterized by the avoidance of reality, this seems like the better referent for the painting’s Contemporary Abstraction™, which starts to sound less like the press release noise it first seemed and more like a condemnation.Others might find more and better to criticize in Four Seasons, but it would require remaining longer in the room, which I venture to guess they won’t do.

About the Author:
Eric Bayless-Hall teaches and studies in New York. His writing appears in The Revenant Quarterly.

A Sense As Cold...

February 9, 2026, by Arnold Klein

The University of Chicago famously did away with its varsity sports programs in the 1920s; by the time I got there, however, a few of these had been restored (I was a three-letter man in one of them). In the interim, though, the students perfected a different competitive sport, one modeled for them with great skill by the faculty, namely, condescension—in which, I must admit, my record in the classroom, on the Quads, and around the coffee shops, about matched mine on the piste: 49-50.But that was only intramural. Outside the walls, in that great humbug, the world, one passed for a prodigy. One-upmanship belongs to that class of cruelties a philosopher has well-called “ordinary,” but the UC imparted a refinement of it that was distinctively its own. It consisted in the self-assurance that you knew everyone’s special intellectual business better than they themselves did; and what made the habitus hard to kick was that, more often than you might think, one did know it better—always did, when the business in question had anything to do with reading books, for twelve quarters of it left one pretty good at finding and following “the structure of the discourse” with an acuity, an assiduity, an accuracy, and always with an openness to the thinking and admiration for the thinker, that really did set one—I no longer say “above” everyone not so versed—but certainly apart from them: you often found yourself wondering what the devil people thought they were doing when they read anything serious.Now, the competition described above was a collegiate affair; it was part of the undergraduate ethos to regard graduate students as not worth bothering with, and as to professors—well, they were absolutely out of one’s league. One of my central teachers was a stylist in the Santayana mold, whose prose combined beauty and rigor; another was actually a master mind; the best was 6’6’’; and in general, one was glad to look up to the faculty, and took in good part their condescensional finesse, when they cared to display it, which some of them did pretty regularly, at least at me. But, for all that, I waive the rare opportunity offered, posthumously, as it were, by some of his writings, to condescend to a UC professor, eminent, and justly eminent, for learning and brains, and celebrated by his students for his scrupulous and effective teaching; one, moreover, with whose very-UChicago conception of liberal education I more or less completely agree. (The “less” part will clarify itself as we go along.) For those writings exemplify (among others things) what happens when a certain kind of prepossessions—in this case, ethical ones—meets a certain kind of objects—in what follows, a few dramatic poems—and by “what happens” I mean what is ignored, what is distorted to fit, what is lost, what is fobbed off and what is foisted on: a whole schedule of the malpractices consequent upon subsuming the individual under the general without sufficiently “minding the gap,” as they say on the London subways, between those two uses of the same article. This mode of—felonious subsumption, if I may be allowed to add yet another crime to the intellectual statute books— is by no means, as Gilson puts it, an error of small minds; indeed, the very self-confidence that great intelligence has in its own real superiority is a great source of it. And this, too, these writings exemplify, for the liability to such over-estimations (and to the underestimations these necessarily entail) is quite wide-spread, and I hope to characterize it a little more closely later on, and perhaps impart my personal name for it. But first the prepossessions.Our author’s position (or the part of it needed for what follows) is that human beings, who have bodies and souls, should, by way of giving each endowment its due, govern their instincts by reason, in the aspect of the virtues; that the selfish desire for glory, for example, when so governed, is changed into a worthy aspiration for nobility; that eros, though allowed to have a physical as well as a psychical reference, gains, in this way, wisdom for one of its proper objects; and that all these are not ideological prejudices relative to history or culture, but truths of human nature that apply everywhere and always.It is clear that this position is at odds with then-current, and I will add, still-current, American notions of freedom (as spontaneity), democracy (as egalitarian), relativism (cultural and/or historical) and sex (as at once casual and momentously important), and with ever-persisting romantic conceptions of love (as an acute exalted emotional state, valued for its own sake); clear, too, that an educational program inheres in it, in which the student’s own striving is directed, through the careful and rigorous reading of such materials as have proven themselves rewarding along these lines, toward real freedom, from, in the first instance, the cant of her time and place, and ultimately as wisdom and self-control. (This is more or less the “more” part of the “more or less” above.)Now, if the truths in question be transtemporal and transcultural—human, that is—it is natural that our professor should find the works of that great humanist, Shakespeare, in agreement with them; and here the descent from the universal to the idiosyncratic begins, and is, well, bungled. I will take only a few parts of our professor’s survey of a few plays to illustrate this.In Troilus and Cressida, says our professor, Shakespeare “suggests…that wisdom, austere and externally unattractive, is the one thing permanently available to man that is noble and choiceworthy.” “Suggests” covers a good deal of ground, and the play is heavily freighted with actual stupidities; “but for a few choice viewers,” Ulysses, alone among the characters, “represents” something like practical wisdom, and his action in the play—principally his “instructing” Achilles in nobility and subjecting Troilus to the “terrible torture” of watching Cressida vamp—“accomplishes” the exposure of heroic and romantic illusions, and “this” will “ultimately restores peace.”I will quarrel with “represents” as we go along; for the moment, observe how it universalizes the particular, and, to that extent, is a case of what Bentham calls “begging the question with a single word.” And I suspect what constitutes those “viewers” “few” and “choice” is their sharing with Ulysses the vocation of instructing and torturing the virile young for their own good. But, as to the play at hand, is any of this stuff about Ulysses actually, I do not say “true,” but right? Does the subsumption in question, of Ulysses under “unattractive sapience,” actually consist with the exact wording of the lines that actually create that specific speaker and situate him in this play?In the course of what our professor calls his “earnest but sophomoric love talk” in the opening scene, the “love-moody” Troilus particulates Cressida:

                            Her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice;
                            O…

In so doing, he multiplies words (all those “hers”); and since he indicates that Pandarus has already said all this (“This thou tell’st me/As true thou tell’st me”) multiplies them not only by particulation, but by frank repetition.He has done this earlier in the scene, in his second set of lines, polyptotonically, with strong, strength, skillful, skill, fierce, and fierceness, and in his following duet with Pandarus (I say “duet” because our prof says that P “is a character reminiscent of Viennese light opera”—one who bequeaths his audience his diseases, be it noted), in which Pandarus particulates a cake in terms of the operations needed to make it, in the course of which account he repeats grinding, bolting and leavening, ay, to, must and, of course tarry, with Troilus joining in at each point with his repeated have I not tarried and still have I tarried, the last term notable for calling attention to the delay that talking in this way effects.So it is not “love-moodiness” in general, whatever that is, that Troilus generically instances, but a very specific set of locutions whose significance he does not knowingly intend, and which his interlocutor reproduces unawares, but which the playwright—who, after all, had something in mind in constructing and patterning the speeches in just this way, which only this way accomplishes—unerringly produced; and the question is, does the wise Ulysses join in this way of talking?Of course he does: the play would fail its own particular unity if he did not.Our professor understands the shrewd rhetorical strategy that informs Ulysses’ famous “speech on degree” (many professors do not), but the specific manner in which the speech continues the earlier “love talk” and cake-baking are left out of his account:

                            The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre
                            Observe degree, priority, and place,
                            Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
                            Office, and custom, in all line of order...                            ...What plagues, and what portents, what mutiny,
                            What raging of the sea, shaking of the earth,
                            Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors,
                            Divert and crack, rend and deracinate…

Repetition-cum-particulation de luxe, and I’m leaving some out. And here’s two formulations that are pretty much tropologically equivalent to “love-moodiness”:

                            Then everything include itself in power,
                            Power into will, will into appetite,
                            And appetite...                            ...The general’s disdained
                            By him one step below, he by the next,
                            That next by him beneath; so every step...

As to delay, Ulysses himself calls his degree-speech “a tale of length,” and sums it up in eight words. Agamemnon then asks point-blank for his remedy, and Ulysses responds, not with the remedy (which, for all we ever find out, he may not even have), but with a detailed description of Achilles & Co’s shenanigans before being interrupted by the meaningless blaring of the tucket that precedes the arrival of Aeneas, who shows that the Trojans are no less particulative, repetitious and retardative than the Greeks—one of the many ways in which the two antagonists are shown to be the same, and their death-struggle, pointless:

                            ...But peace, Aeneas;
                            Peace, Troyan; lay thy finger on thy lips...

Whereupon Agamemnon asks him “call you yourself Aeneas?” Which is one of the best jokes ever.Now, Aeneas is brought on at just this point so that Ulysses never gets to get to the remedy of which his previous 200 or so lines are presumably a preamble: the Ajax-device is prompted by Aeneas’s (lengthily delivered) challenge. In other words, the promised remedy is never given, though all the rhetorical steps to it are, and at length—just as Pandarus’s cake is never eaten, and Troilus’s resolve to unarm, the explanation of which is the subject of his whole duet in I.i, is never acted on. So to particulation and the rest we can add null-effect: all the talking has been for nothing, Ulysses’ no less than Pandarus’s. And—lest we forget—the plot to use Ajax to incite Achilles proves “not worth a blackberry,” despite what our prof calls Ulysses’ “shrewd management” of it; indeed, it backfires completely: and if the Greeks do “draw together” in Act V, it is no thanks to it, or him: Ajax and Achilles get off their butts for fortuitous personal reasons alone; and although it may be generally true, as our prof reminds us, that the policies of able politicians can fail due to the “limitations of men,” the specific question here is, why make Ulysses’ come so deflatedly a cropper. And while we’re at it, though “peace” may be “ultimately” restored in some fictional sequel, this play ends with Troilus voicing his “hope of revenge.”Ulysses says of Cressida:

                            There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip;
                            Nay, her foot speaks. Her wanton spirits look out
                            At every joint and motive of her body.
                            O...

The professor calls this speech “moralistic,” takes it, that is, in isolation from Troilus’s “sophomoric” love talk (which repeats, be it recalled, the light-operatic Pandarus’s), with which its particulative syntax plainly links it. The two adjectives in inverted commas belong to a subclass of question-beggars which, having discovered it, I hereby arrogate to myself the right to name: prerogative-adjective abuse.I could go on, but this is not an essay on this great poem. Before leaving it, though, observe that our professor omits the whole feasting business, which is so crucial to the play: for unless all the warriors on both sides meet face-to-face at some point, as they do here, the joke about their not recognizing each other on the battlefield, armored up and de-humanized as they all eagerly are (“Wilt though not, beast, abide?”), couldn’t get played. I call it a joke, because I am in on it, not because it lacks high moral seriousness.For high moral seriousness Troilus and Cressida does have; but if it is to be, what the professor seems to wish, a factor in moral paideia, it must be as it really exists, with all its inflections, weirdnesses, idiosyncrasies and plurivocalities, as these are expressed through all the resources of poetic drama, right down to those two post-particulative O’s that link the “love-moody” Troilus to the “dog-fox” Ulysses.But before we get to how such an apprehension may be an even greater moral factor, a few more examples of how our prof’s insistence on seeing specific characters as “representative” of universal human liabilities simplifies and, well—given the apex-level of the things he’s dealing with—levels down the complexity of his chosen plays.In The Merchant of Venice, he tells us, Shakespeare is “interested...in man’s attempt to become man and man alone,” a humanistic interest if there ever was one. “He was of the conviction that…when confronted with one another” directly, different principles “must necessarily quarrel.” OK; but on the way from this generality, our professor says that Antonio, whose Christian “sympathy cannot extend to a man who denies the fundamental principle of charity” (which would sort of make him unChristian), has “spit on Shylock.” But that isn’t quite so; Shylock does not say Antonio has spit on him. What he actually says is that Antonio has spit “upon my Jewish gabardine,” and that makes a very big difference.Clothes determine persons in the play, and as they change, so do the persons. Portia and Nerissa “turn to men,” and Portia to a “doctor of Rome” by borrowing “garments” of Doctor Bellario; Launcelot goes from serving “the very devil incarnation” to serving one who has “the grace of God” by virtue of his changing liveries; Solario’s imaginary ship, “my wealthy Andrew” (which becomes a “her” in the next line), may “enrobe the roaring waters with my silks—

                            and, in a word, but even now worth this,
                            And now worth nothing?

I’ll stop there; but notice that the changes of identity involved with clothes in just these three instances pertain to gender, titles, profession, social status, hometown, economic standing, religion (“I am a Jew if I serve the Jew any longer”), and—“in a word”—words (“You call me misbeliever, cutthroat dog”…“and say there is much kindness in the Jew”). Oh, and let’s not forget Jessica, who, by dressing up as a boy, is “transformèd,” and becomes a Christian, a quarrel-free conversion she regards as a change of “manners,” which, whatever they may be, don’t seem much like our professor’s “principles.” No wonder, with all these markers of identity depending on outward show, that no one in the play knows who is what when they can’t see them, either because they’re actually blind, like Old Gobbo, who is in the play just to show that, or temporarily unseeing, as are Jessica and Lorenzo, at night—L: “Ho! who’s within?” J: “Who are you?”—until a torch is lit. Little candles really do throw their beams pretty far in this “naughty world,” where a few drowned silks instantly reduce your worth from “this” to “nothing.”So whatever Shakespeare is “interested in” in this play acquires a very complex coloration, even from these few passages; indeed, a single right question—right because specific—to wit, “why the gabardine?”—lets us begin to see one of his interests very clearly, for in The Merchant, as in Troilus (“Have you any eyes, do you know what a man is?”), outward aspect, or “attribute,” is impermanent: there are no stable statuses. So one question, I do not say all, but a substantial subset of the plays of our poet (of whose life, thank God, so little is known that it relieves me of having to argue that by his name we are postulating an aesthetic physiognomy, not referring to an empirical person) is interested in, is what, if anything, is left of humans—of “man and man alone”—when all the changeful determinants are stripped off.Well, in a naughty world—a world of naught, as Auden rightly construes it—you’d expect the answer to be, well, naught; that is, nothing. But that answer, too, needs some inflecting.The question in question is raised in its epistemological aspect in The Winter’s Tale, as what is certain. No one agrees on anything in this play, and when they do, it is only for the playwright’s purpose of proving them wrong, mistaken, or deceived. I don’t want to go through the innumerable instances of certainty being ascribed—to eyes, ears, noses, hands, the oracle (the two envoys who hear its voice are “ear-deafened” by it, and it’s a priest, not a god, who hands them the envelope)—only to be retracted (“bare eyes” by “the pin and web,” etc.); I want to go a different way, which touches more on our bungling prof’s procedures.Now, The Winter’s Tale leaves the question of Hermione quite uncertain; but, either way, if she is guilty of adultery with Polixenes or not, there is a whiff of incest in the air. If she is actually guilty, and Polixenes is Perdita’s father, then Perdita and her intended Florizel are half-siblings. If Hermione is actually guiltless, then Leontes is Perdita’s father, and his suddenly leching vocally after the girl when he first sees her is simply incestuous. Our professor buys the “ear-deafened,” the-envelope-please-and-the-winner-is line—he finds Hermione “an unusually attractive, frank, intelligent, and open woman” (my itals, his “unusually”)—and explains the lech as “a gentle and ironic presentation of the perpetual Oedipus question.” But those strangely inapposite prerogative adjectives aside, the specific question is, why the lech in the first place? Why make incest an issue either way Hermione’s business is settled, only to squelch one possibility of its coming to fruition (but not the will to it) after two lines? The lech has nothing to do with the action or the characterization of Leontes. So why is it in this play?Well, consider how little the bear who eats Antigonus is concerned that the human whose shoulder-bone he has just torn off is, as the man himself is at pains to proclaim with his dying breath, “a nobleman.” And consider how indifferently nature propagates “bastard” flowers, and “betters” herself in so doing, according to Polixenes anyway, who is, however, so attached to pedigree as to disown his son, “a scepter’s heir,” if he marries “a sheep-hook” (doubly fatuous, if Perdita is his—though blue-bloods have never been averse to a little inbreeding). Humans care about status and blood lines; nature does not. All “great creating nature” seems to care about is, well, creating greatly; and as far as that goes, humans may as well be as promiscuous as squashes, who are notoriously given to heterozygosis.Now, epistemologically speaking, natural, on-going fecundity is the one thing in The Winter’s Tale constant enough to be verily known. Accordingly, the one thing everyone agrees on is the beauty of a fifteen-year-old girl’s fruiting body; and that is the only value our subset of plays finally arrives at. (Other plays that pose the question are Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, and Coriolanus.) If, as Santayana says, “nature can never be man’s ideal,” then Shakespeare is no idealist. Nor is it likely that a poet whose ultimate value turns out to be one of the few things humans have in common with our frenemies the fungi (who, indeed, rank us, sporulation-wise) is the “inventor” of “the human” that a different, not-nearly-so deservedly eminent, Professor Bloom proclaims him to be. Our own professor defines nihilism as “a chaos of the instincts or passions...The soul becomes a repertory company that changes plays regularly—sometimes a tragedy, sometimes a comedy, one day love, another day politics...now cosmopolitanism, and again rooted loyalty...” and I would not, by these lights, so designate Shakespeare. Buu-ut...now “worth this,” then “now worth nothing,” then again “worth this”? Now girl, now boy, then girl? Now bosom-buddies, now enemies, now machetenim? Now nobleman, now dinner, now fertilizer? Well, if I don’t call that nihilistic, exactly, it’s because I want to call it nihiline, a word I just read somewhere, if I haven’t just made it up, and want to use, rightly or wrongly, for the pleasure of it. Nihiline.Well, that was fun, but the point of this excursion has been that this prof’s treatment of some particular dramatic poems exemplified the catastrophe that befalls generalizers when they come down, with a thud, on the singular, in our case, when the generalizer begins from what he takes to be, and may even really be, the permanently moral, and subsumes under its categories the particularities of particular plays, without bothering to ask for the particular reasons those particular plays have for those particularities—why those two “O”s, that gabardine, that split second of Oedipal disinhibition. His philosophical bêtes noires are relativists, specifically historicists; but the same catastrophe afflicts this school of generalizers too, who, from their broad characterization of a temporally- and/or locally-defined context of some notional sort or other, venture upon the intrinsically unique; for whether it be in time or in eternity that either set their traps, the general will catch, in isolation from all the actually relevant others, only those particulars as are, or are imagined to be, or may not even be, or may not even remotely be, amenable to the terms of their chosen generalizations. And the same fallacy is called on by each school to justify the procedure: that the individual in question “represents” whatever generality they have it in mind to belabor.Now, this gross misconduct is especially flagrant when the fish being fried are particular works of art, each of which is intrinsically integral, and unified on principles uniquely its own, and represents nothing but itself. But I said that our particular professor’s procedure exemplifies a wider intellectual liability, whose ill consequences are, let us say, a good deal more momentous. To characterize his method a little more closely, it seems to be something like deduction: it starts with abstract truths and deduces from them the categories and concepts under which all particulars are presumptively considered subsumable. And, as far as reasoning goes, his conclusions may well follow from his premises and be, to that extent, what logicians call “valid.” But, as we said, at a certain point there is a hiatus in the series—the point at which we cease dealing in general properties and propositions and come to what Cardinal Newman calls “concrete matter.” Ratiocination here requires more than intellection alone to save it from becoming unreal; it requires what his Eminence calls “the illative sense;” and whatever “illative” means here, it is the sense part that is relevant to the hiatus in question.“Sense” is hard to define, and in art-cases, particularly so; the possession of it manifests itself in particular judgements of individual things, which must be as infinitely various as the things themselves; but one word Newman uses that is practically an alternative designation for it is tact—not the knowledge of, but the fingertip-feeling for, when, where and if general conclusions, however well-grounded in logic or experience, are to be applied, modified, inflected, or just plain dropped; and this touch our professor’s treatment of his subjects completely lacks: indeed, he could not have chosen a wronger poet for his ministrations than he did. To complete the quote which has given me my title, he comes to Shakespeare with a sense as cold

                            As is a dead man’s nose.

Now, Newman tells us that a person who possesses this sense in one field may lack it in all others, and it would seem that recognizing one’s own limitations in this regard requires a sense of the very same kind, which likewise might be lacking. When it is, and great intelligence fails to mind the gap between its deductions and individual cases, you get that peculiar combination of brain power and unreality I mentioned at the outset, that I have taken to calling the higher stupidity. You find it in literary critics, whose profound apprehension of Aristotle’s four-causal Poetics leads them to foist “plots” onto lyric poems; in Assistant Secretaries of State who are sure they know, and can control, what will happen in a country after they invade it and depose its regime; in economists who think that, economic rationality being eternally what it is, young people have children as a hedge against the high fees they anticipate paying for elder care sixty-five years hence—But I won’t call the role of all the University of Chicago departments chargeable under this rubric. It would seem that the fundamental problem in all such cases is one of direction: instead of descending to particulars, such brainiacs might try staying by them long enough to make sure their hot-air gasbags are fully full before wafting off into the intense inane. But the particular-up direction may be bungled, too. In the case of art works, the problem is that any collocation of particulars must preserve the integrity of each individual, whole and entire—an integrity that makes them each, in the first and last analysis, to begin and end with, actually incomparable. What constitutes tact in such an operation is a feel for which works, when placed side-by-side, may so mutually inflect each other’s actual incomparability as to increase and refine our acquaintance with it just as in itself it actually is. Whether the subset of Shakespeare plays I floated above, starting as it did from some peculiarities of Troilus and Cressida, displays such tact or not, it at least remained cognizant of its own heuristic character.But, of course, there is nothing in starting with particulars that requires going anywhere but to other particulars. The refusal of generality—of collocality, even—may strike moral absolutists and cultural relativists as irresponsible, but even my nihiline grouping is not without its moral significance, for nihilism, too, is a moral attitude, and it is well, especially paideia-istically speaking, to see it so nuance-laden-ly worked out. (We have come full-on to the “less” part of the “more or less” we started with.) But more: appreciating the thing before us, just as in itself it really is, is a taking on of responsibility for one’s relation to it, not a dodging of it. Another word for this act is attention, which, a philosopher tells us, is itself a moral act, indeed, the moral act, from which any action that is truly regardful must begin. And the open spirit that welcomes all such plural uniquenesses just as they are, and preserves them from being reprobated, faulted, dismissed, blended, pureed, liquified or, worse yet, impressed into the service of a generalized dogmatics of any ilk, was still truly abroad at UC when I was a student there, at least in the departments I hung around in.

About the Author:
Arnold Klein's work appears regularly in The Revenant Quarterly.

The Consolation of Illustration
Dana Schutz’s Console at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

January 18, 2026 | by Candice T. Seymour

Dana Schutz, Console, 2003. Oil paint on canvas, 66 × 60 inches.

Painters sure seem to love Dana Schutz. Allegedly she’s a painter’s painter. Whatever that means. If Schutz’s Console is a painter’s painter’s painting, the epithet must not mean much. With a color scheme like that of a children’s television series, the mid-sized painting shows two composite figures, one with the head of a cartoon-like dinosaur and the other a cyclopic half-human, forming a compositional chiasmus as they embrace. Their mismatched parts—more or less human or artificial, natural or prosthetic—suggest wear and tear, and repair: limbs ripped off, subsequent surgeries performed without requisite replacement parts. The plasticky quality of the oil paint recalls children’s toys and the unmixed impastos that visually stack to compose the hybrid figures suggest the piecemeal constructions of Tinker Toys or Lincoln Logs. It is tempting to imagine that through this hug the two figures are supporting each other, engaging, perhaps, in another exchange of parts, as their chiasmic configuration and the title suggests.Yet this narrative of deformation and reformation is merely suggested (its substance recalled, imagined) by a viewer who, disappointed by the painting, tries to grasp why the Metropolitan Museum of Art would give it a wall in its contemporary wing (thereby claiming it to be an exemplar of 21st century art). The painting’s form—its specific relation of parts to whole, visually and conceptually—lacks the composition, decomposition, and recomposition of material and image necessary to realize such a narrative. Or if you, like me, suspect that no paintings are, nor possibly could be, narrative, but, rather, must (to be art at all) embody what it is they are of; that is, to realize a painted world in which two creatures of artifice have their given bodies destroyed and repaired piecemeal, the painting itself (its givens and its body) would have to undergo a process of destruction and reconstruction analogous to that of its depicted toy-like subjects.But the painting is made without play, despite its cartoon-y style, and without struggle, despite the amputations and repairs that its Frankenstein figures seem to have undergone. The confusion of which body part belongs to whom is only superficial: overlapping bodies, a contaminating brushstroke crossing one color scheme into the other. The few dollops of paint, suggestions of the play in painting, the accidents that lead to discoveries, function more like stickers: one imagines them carefully applied to the canvas after it was finished, like cherries on top of a sundae. The thin yellow-and-blue background reads as a way of filling space quickly and merely, a rote solution with no significant relation to the figures. Ultimately, the painting is superficial, like the figures it represents. But unlike them, it has not been torn apart and rebuilt. Its body remains safely intact, if empty: decorated with pretty colors and kind-of-nice brushstrokes. If it had taken its own world seriously (embodying instead of illustrating), it might have risked decomposition, attaining life by cannibalizing itself. But it stopped short, content with mere suggestion. Perhaps to be a painter’s painter is to play it safe, believing that a predetermined composition, a premixed palette from an undergrad color theory lesson, and some controlled impastos are enough. Painter’s painters would be, then, those would-be painters who never develop beyond the level of the art student (in the narrow sense of performing rote actions within specified limitations; not the sense in which all real artists must remain students). If that’s the case, a painter’s painter (at least according to this painting by Schutz) isn’t a painter at all, but an illustrator of painting, who, consoling herself with what she already knows, ignores the moment when a painting demands to become itself by tearing itself apart.

About the Author:
Candice T. Seymour loves good artworks, suspects most artists don’t actually care about art, and hates nihilistic “critics”. Her essays have been published in Caesura.
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Le Repas Frugal

January 6, 2026 | by Emmet Elliott

Pablo Picasso, Le Repas Frugal, 1904, printed 1913. Etching, 25 11/16 x 19 11/16 inches (sheet), 18 1/4 x 14 7/8 inches (plate).

The plate has been polished clean. The bottle has been almost emptied. In this etching, completed by a 22 year-old Pablo Picasso in 1904—his second print ever—we find a terrifyingly hungry young man.The plate itself was inherited from another artist, and would have had to be polished before etching could begin. If the faint thicket above the woman’s head is any indication, Picasso was eager to put this stage of the process behind him. The traces of bushes, as well as of grass and stones along the left, show us that the plate had been a landscape before Picasso turned it 90 degrees, and into the haunting portrait of an impoverished couple.Yet it is not simply a portrait. Picasso also borrows another genre from his tutor Cézanne—the still-life—to amplify poverty by foregrounding what is not there: more bread, for example, food on the plate, or knife and spoon. The plate looks to have been wiped clean, probably by the missing half of bread, and eaten with the hands. But whose hands? Maybe only one of them is ravenous. After all, her face is rendered with prominent cheekbones, yes, but it is not, as his, emaciated. There is still bread in front of her, her glass is half full, and perhaps most notably, her mouth is not open, not searching for the next morsel, but pursed. No, they are not hungry—he is hungry.But why should we associate the man who would go on to become the most prolific artist of the 20th century with the man in the etching? Is it because of his left hand, which emerges floatingly to the right of his companion’s face, drawing her into mid-air with impossibly long, articulate fingers (her left shoulder will be the final stroke)? Is it because the man seems to be missing his eyes? Because his eyes cannot be shown looking to the left of the frame while at the same time looking at the whole of the frame, gazing from the same position as ours? Does their absence from the picture—all the more conspicuous for their contrast with her vacant stare—call attention to their presence in front of it? And is it because we have seen Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, done only three years later, and know that the theme of the gaze, of looking at women with a jarring eroticism, would come to be a central aspect of Picasso’s work?Perhaps. But just as Demoiselles, this piece escapes simple reductions. There is just too much to see: the mysterious shadow behind the man which echoes the soon-to-be-empty bottle; the tablecloth (or is it paper?), which could almost be a cubist painting from ten years in the future, and repeats itself around and rhymes with the man’s neck; the subtle (and not so subtle) allusions to death, catholicism and even the printing process itself: an ink bottle, plate, and sponge all placed on a sheet of white paper. We can see Picasso musing on poverty, on death, on drunkenness, on printmaking and maybe even on what lays ahead of him… but the violence of desire, as much as we might wish otherwise, is as unavoidable for us as it was for him. Picasso keeps bringing us back to those four hands—which build an echo of the etching plate at its center—and what they frame. They frame the object of a young man’s desires, the source of his insatiable hunger in the stark black and white of ink on paper.

Pablo Picasso, Le Repas Frugal, detail.

About the Author:
Emmet Elliott studies, practices, and writes about architecture, urbanism, and the visual arts.

Perception and the Essay of Criticism

December 15, 2025 | by Eric Bayless-Hall

Dewey was right about one thing, at least. Seeing (or hearing, etc.) a work of art one is not merely passive. Just as the artist’s work wasn’t pure activity, but was, instead, punctuated by periods of seeing what’s just been done, so the viewer is not merely receiving the work in front of her, but engaged in actively recreating it: coming to see the connections between points or marks or themes or thoughts that the work of art is made of. We don’t need to buy a philosopher’s first principles and last conclusions to borrow the wisdom that washes up between them. And ordinary Dewey is wiser than most—enough to see a distinction worth making for all your gold: recognition is not perception.Forget, for once and for a while, your pet theory of recognition, and consider the sense this makes: we recognize what we know well enough for a purpose; whereas we begin to perceive when we haven’t yet finished learning what we’re looking at.Recognition is, on this view, a toolbox of types by which we fit a manifold world into familiar forms—classify quickly threats and objects of desire and the means to avoid and pursue them. We recognize, roughly, the things we have easy words for—this or that as this or that sort of thing; a pear, a panther, a painting, Paul Newman. However we came to see the world in the first place, the fact is, we find ourselves here, having started, and our seeing of things is always and irreducibly a seeing-cum-understanding—that is, we recognize more or less when we look. But the miracle of perception is—and it is, indeed, a miracle, for it seems, not only unexplained, but unexplainable without begging the question—that looking with attention actually discovers more than it originally recognized. That we recognize the world is remarkable; that it continues to reveal itself to attention is more remarkable still. This discovery of what’s in front of you by means of attention is what Dewey calls perception, and that it takes the form of modifying what we first thought we saw is what he means in saying recognition, though it is not yet perception, is the beginning of perception.Perceiving is a name for the work of seeing something unique, something that cannot be classed without sacrificing something of its distinctive character. Looking—really looking—which is as much an activity of the mind as the eye—reveals, remarkable as it continues to sound, this thing we’re attending to to be more and often other than we thought at first blush. Our initial recognition is developed, by an activity involving language as originally as color, into a more intimate familiarity with this particular thing. The more one looks, the more peculiar the thing under inspection becomes; and the more peculiarities one comes to find definitive of what this thing is, the more one will insist on the insufficiency of what we’re calling recognition: that you have to see, really see it.Whatever else we come to view as particulars—people, for instance, and the things we love—works of art can almost be defined as those human products whose particularity we insist on in our meaningful dealings with one another. Recognition doesn’t begin to account for our interest in them; nothing said about a work will be relevant until it springs from (what we’re calling here) perception.With these notions in hand it should be needless to say that the critic of art ought to perceive the work they write about—really see it. It will be equally obvious, however, that much of what passes for criticism is but the rehearsal of what is recognized. Critics, if there are any, are hardly more insightful on the whole than the tourist eager to announce before his tour guide tells him that that, in fact, is a Rothko they’re approaching. If you’ve had one Rothko pointed out to you, you can recognize them all as belonging to this type; but this patron, like the critic who associates in front of a painting without discovering these connections in the work under consideration, exhibits the perceptive powers of the man who catcalls legs from his car. What has actually been seen?And why is anyone supposed to care? Why write—and why read—art criticism that doesn’t do the work, first, of seeing what it’s pointing to, and second, of communicating it coherently? Here I’ll just report a hypothesis I’ve harbored for some time and say: serious looking will express itself in serious writing. My proof? The pudding. Try conveying a perception (in our sense here) in easy words and see if you don’t find yourself walking a thin ridge between the stodgy and the inane. Slipping into either you will know yourself to betray the sense you hope to express. If perception requires work, then this goes doubly for the writing of what’s perceived. One wonders how critics, supposedly devoted to the power of art, forget when they face the page that they face a form of the same problem as the artist.Now these two requirements, as I see them, for a critic—that they work really to see what they criticize and that they work really to write it—grow out of the basic nature of the undertaking: writing about works one’s encountered; and says about this undertaking only: strive to do it well or not at all. It should not be taken to deny, however, that writing about art well can take many forms, nor that critics, like artists, like humans, fall short on occasion. It is to say, rather, that criticism is to be an essay of one’s sense: an attempt to convey the reality one perceives as one perceives it, and this will involve criticizing oneself and one’s sense as much as the work one’s work is about.

About the Author:
Eric Bayless-Hall teaches and studies in New York. His writing appears in The Revenant Quarterly.

Alla Prima Amnesia
Phoebe Helander’s Paintings from the Orange Room at P·P·O·W

December 15, 2025 | by Anna Gregor

Phoebe Helander, Bowl of Milk III, 2025. Oil on wood, 11 1/4 × 13 1/2 inches.

There must be over fifty paintings in Phoebe Helander’s Paintings from the Orange Room at P·P·O·W. All are still lifes, approximately head-sized. Most are painted on uncradled slabs of wood, some of which have already begun to warp or split. The panels appear to be prepared hastily and en masse, their edges splintered and striped with drips of gesso.The paintings are nice, even refreshing, compared to the other painting shows on view in the area. The lack of preciousness evident in the panel preparation contrasts with the careful representations of familiar still-life objects while accentuating the materiality of the painted images. In the best of the paintings, material support, brushstroke, and represented object correspond, synthesizing present and re-presented objects (painting and still-life subject). In these works, the close-looking of observational painting is materialized, asking for and rewarding the same type of close-looking on the viewer’s part. The white lines separating the segments of a lemon echo the drips of primer down the sides of the wood slab. A crack in the wood panel creeps across the representation of a fallen red glass, as if the cup’s fragile surface too threatened to split. The wrinkled surface of unevenly dried paint acknowledges the passage of time while representing a momentary quiver in a bowl of milk.

Phoebe Helander, Cross-Section of an Old Lemon II, 2025. Oil on wood, 11 1/4 × 13 inches.

This synthesis, however, happens in only a few of the paintings in the show. The many others land in the comfortable realm of alla prima still life—fine enough (for decoration). But the paintings claim to do more (or, rather, their maker claims they do in the show’s accompanying essay and press release): to bear witness to change and instability in a world that quantifies, sensationalizes, and advertises. But although painted in front of wilting bouquets and burning candles, flower and flame alike may well have been painted from photograph, so stable and unproblematic are Helander’s finished paintings. There is nothing inherently wrong with paintings that take on the quality of photographs. But we do not see like cameras. And Helander’s commitment to durational six- to ten-hour alla prima painting sessions of changing objects, to perception beyond the screen, more often than not results in photographic images, so that the process is only discoverable in her writing (by turning our attention away from the works to read an explanation of them):“So I end up continually painting over my work, re-making the same central area of the composition, for as long as the candle burns. Loss is a natural part of change, and that’s something I accept as a part of this work. My goal is to stay with the flame.”A nice idea. But paintings are ideas materialized. And the idea is not materialized in most paintings in the show.Paintings are static, visual objects. To materialize loss, a painting must contain what was before—it must reveal its own history visually. Such a commitment to durational attention as Helander’s, if it is to become art and not simply a token of her personal meditation (for what could we viewers learn from the latter?), must solve the formal problem of how to embody the phenomenological experience of an object that is three-dimensional and temporal by nature in the two-dimensional and static medium of paint. This problem was not solved, once and for all, with Cubism, or Futurism, or any other Modern -ism. It remains the problem of each painting today. How do we represent the world when we are habituated (addicted) to having screens and algorithms pre-process experience for us?Contrary to Helander’s “staying with the flame,” the kind of attention that is the antidote to the doomscrolling, ad-riddled, ADHD-inducing addiction of contemporary life is not the mere presentness of sense certainty, for which this-here-now is all there is and is gone as soon as it is. Such is the ahistorical presentness of the amnesiac. A productive presence of mind would rather be a type of attention that brings its past forward with it: a presentness with a historical consciousness that is aware that the material it encounters is informed by what happened before—whether the wax formations of a melting candle, a prior brushstroke by one’s own hand, or the historical genre of still-life painting—and is the ground from which the future develops. The real problem is how to cultivate presence of mind while committing to what came before and what comes after: a problem that painting alla prima may not be able to tackle with its limit of working only while the paint is wet. What happens when Helander commits to the same painting day after day? Month after month? The solution would perhaps not be so fresh, so nice, so many (so potentially profitable). I venture to think that such an undertaking might be appealing to Helander, given the values she articulates in her essay and her attraction to materials that change over time (pools of medium-rich paint that will wrinkle as they dry, warping supports that will crack the paint film).That most of Helander’s paintings don’t go beyond a way of seeing habituated to a pre-processed, flattened image taken by a mechanized cyclopic lens, is understandable given the nature of her undertaking. The formal-material problem she has set herself, which requires overcoming deep conventions of how we see today, is vast enough to devote a life to. The three or four paintings in the show that hint at a solution to the problem are promising steps for further inquiry. That the show at large doesn’t go beyond an Instagram-like glut of images, turning the three room gallery space into a kind of feed in which the viewer circumambulates instead of scrolling through images packed too close to each other, however, undercuts the project. The painter’s commitment to this problem would be more convincing had the forty-six or -seven other paintings been left out. The success of this project would entail that each painting asks a viewer to look at it with the same degree of effort and attention that was put into it—an impossible task in a space packed with fifty paintings and nowhere to sit.

Phoebe Helander, Cross-Section of an Old Lemon II, 2025. Oil on wood, 11 1/4 × 13 inches.

Phoebe Helander, Paintings from the Orange Room, P·P·O·W, 390 Broadway, 2nd Floor, October 31 - December 20, 2025About the Author:
Anna Gregor is a painter who occasionally writes about Paintings. Her essays can be read in The Revenant Quarterly, Caesura, and Two Coats of Paint.

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Homage To—

December 15, 2025 | by Arnold Klein

Peter Fuller somewhere recounts how his unconversion from what may be called the Acrid School of Marxist Art Criticism was effected by his encounter with an ancient sculpted head, whose power to move him he found wholly unrelated to the class struggle, means of production, false consciousness, late capitalism and all the rest.Well, I had a similar experience—though not of unconversion from an ideology but of confirmation to what I take to be a cardinal artistic value—up at the MOMA a few years ago when I turned the corner of a room containing the perfectly awful portrait of Condeleezza Rice by Luc Tuymans (and I name it, her and him for a reason) and came across—But before getting to exactly what I came across, let me say of the experience itself that it was characterized by the absence of what I usually find present in my visits to the art world and by the presence of what I usually find woefully absent there.What was absent in that experience that was usually present? Discourse: discourse contextual, biographical, art-historical, critical even, overt or implied; and all the cants respectively accompanying them—the whole logo-noetical sea into which, as Gilson says, everything disappears. (The Talmud is not wrong when it reminds us that the tongue is the only muscle that never gets tired.)What was present, that was usually absent—that obviated discourse, and rendered it impertinent in both senses—malapert in both senses?Imaginative expression.Expression has gotten a bad rap; it has been taken to mean something like unclarified and uncontrolled emotion. But I mean it as referring, in art, to any significant record of a sensory-motor-affective-intellectual experience, including, of course, the (sensory-motor-affective-intellectual) experience of coming to clarify that experience in a material form, that is, in a work; and I call it “imaginative” because it is only in some power that is neither sense, motor, feeling nor intellect only that those (and everything else coming into it) can form a unity and result simultaneously in a record of that unity, that is, in a work. I don’t mean to commit myself to a facultative theory of mind here, only to emphasize that, in expression, the whole person is at once the impetus and the site of a process, whose termination, in art, is a work.As must the whole person be engaged, in the reception of a work.Not the “effect:” effect implies passivity on the part of what is usually called the reader, the viewer, the audience, and so on; the-eye-goes-here-the-eye-goes-there sort of thing; the we-laughed-we-cried sort of thing; the what-did-the-poem-make-you-feel sort of thing. But reception is not passive—you make yourself receptive, you engage (in Captain Picard’s sense) what Pater called “the power of being deeply moved,” as paradoxical, even as oxymoronic as these formulations sound. Not every work put out as art, or putting itself out as such, calls for reception in this sense, the discourse-laden portrait of Rice certainly does not;—or answers your call, though more works than you might think will gladly do so, if asked (but not until then). As Lamb said of certain old books, and as we might say of certain cold people, some art works have to be loved before they will prove themselves worthy of love.So imaginative expression covers both sides, maker and recipient, as the recipient is remaking the expression of which the made thing is the significant record, from that record alone. You can call it communication if you want to, if you emphasize the commune part, the verbal stem, not the petrifying -ation, the noun, and even abstract noun, part, as two whole persons are indeed meeting; but not if you regard communication on the usual verbal model of one-party-telling-something-to-the-other, simply, and disregard the plain fact that the other in even the simplest case must take the words in, which is another way of saying make herself receptive, if communication is to take place at all. And not if you assume, again on the usual verbal model, that communication is always about something (the what-is-she-trying-to-tell-us sort of thing; the what-is-this-movie-really-about sort of thing), as there is no about in communion.So what was the work that confirmed my commitment to imaginative expression as a cardinal artistic value?You see my dilemma: no discourse allowed! But before I name it, and the name attached to it on the museum plaque, let me say something about this sad business of associating art works with the empirical persons usually taken to be their makers—the people who are born, live and die, eventually becoming fodder for biographers—instead of with I will call, following Croce, the aesthetic personage, knowable to us only through, and as, the physiognomy of the works themselves.As to the empirical person: it is not merely that most of the world’s greatest works are anonymous, actually anonymous; it is not merely that the materials for anybody’s life are fragmentary and variously interpretable, when in fact there are any such materials left (as there are not in Shakespeare’s case, among others); it is not merely that most of anybody’s life, and probably the most important part—the moment-to-moment contents of her consciousness—leaves no record, variously interpretable or otherwise; it is not merely that biography is a literary genre and no more to be credited as true than any other subclass of fiction, including history, nor that it follows pseudo-absolute interpretative fads (who swallows “psychobiography” anymore?); it is not merely, in sum, that people are unknowable, even to journalists. It is that the empirical person and the aesthetic personage are of completely different interests.A Nietzsche scholar quoted by Rorty (I don’t have the book to hand) says he is not interested in “the miserable little man who wrote Nietzsche’s books,” but in the character created in them; and here too, I am not interested in the by-all-accounts wonderful empirical person named on the plaque, but in the aesthetic physiognomy projected in the individually characteristic works that go about in the world under her name. Let’s get the order straight: the empirical person, even if we knew anything more than a few promiscuous superficialities about him or her, which we cannot (see above), would be of no interest whatsoever but for its misleading association with the artistic personage and its physiognomy, which we can know so profoundly.1And I might add, know directly. The empirical artist may be sheltering in Rossinière or drinking in Soho or moldering in Vauvenagues Castle or currently dust, but the works are right here, silently calling to us or silently waiting for our call to answer.But here’s the thing: not every work going by an artist’s name will originate in the aesthetic personage and manifest its characteristic physiognomy. The empirical person can still use a paintbrush, and other interests than purely artistic, i.e., imaginatively expressive, ones (rhetorical ones, for example) may direct her hand. Such works will go by the same name as the artistic ones, of course, and sell out of the same dealership and take up space in the same museum, though one would hope an expert institution like the MOMA could discriminate between the two, between what Croce called poesia e non poesia, between painting and not-painting, and not devote wall space to canvasses that have nothing expressive going for them beyond their nominal association with an artist, Luc Tuymans, and his subject, Condeleezza Rice, say.Once upon a time, at Fanelli’s, around one p.m., it was not uncommon for the conversation around not a few tables to turn to the question of “who was the greatest living painter,” and the debate (to date it somewhat) usually devolved into a contest between Balthus and Bacon and sometimes Mitchell, although one of the participants (initials R.L.) always and quite sincerely named himself. Well, convinced as I was that afternoon that whoever made Elephant with White Tusks was our greatest living artist (and no, I haven’t seen everything by everybody—but neither had the Fanelli’s painters, and that didn’t stop them), I set about trying to find other works by the same maker, and here knowing her name was very useful in hunting up a few images and a catalogue; but the one at the MOMA remains the only sculpture that I have seen in person.But at the risk of saying something, not so much about that sculpture as about why you should be interested in it: its chief expressive qualities are compassion and fragility; not compassion for fragility, for the fragility in question includes the compassionator no less than it does the piteous animal embodied in its burnt clay, and, indeed, through that, includes us all, human and animal—since all of us are, like clay, a little earth and a little water, fused for a little while by the fire of vital heat.I have a feeling that this, or something not far from this, is the physiognomic truth of the works that are going about in the world under the name of Daisy Youngblood.

1 And ditto for such curatorial concerns as “The Roots of Fauvism,” “Pioneers of Abstraction” and so on—we would have no interest whatsoever in the inchoate but for the perfections alleged to have developed from it. Matthew Arnold got it right when he warned that the “historical estimate of art” would divert attention to origins and away from the consummations that alone would give them such interest as they might possess. (For a lark, try searching "pioneers" in the MOMA database.)

Daisy Youngblood, Elephant with Tusks, 1995. Low fire clay and paint, 18 1/4 x 14 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches.

About the Author:
Arnold Klein's work appears regularly in The Revenant Quarterly.

PERSEITY

art review

Virtuosic(-ish) and Vacuous: John Singer Sargent and Doron Langberg | by Candice T. Seymour | December 13, 2025

Langberg, Doron
Virtuosic(-ish) and Vacuous: John Singer Sargent and Doron Langberg | by Candice T. Seymour | December 13, 2025

Sargent, John Singer
Virtuosic(-ish) and Vacuous: John Singer Sargent and Doron Langberg | by Candice T. Seymour | December 13, 2025

Seymour, Candice T.
Virtuosic(-ish) and Vacuous: John Singer Sargent and Doron Langberg | by Candice T. Seymour | December 13, 2025

Virtuousic(-ish) and Vacuous
John Singer Sargent and Doron Langberg

December 13, 2025 | by Candice T. Seymour

John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882. Oil on canvas, 87 3/8 × 87 5/8 inches.

There is something off-putting about the paintings of John Singer Sargent. Mention him to a painter and they're certain to remark on his virtuosic paint handling, the luminosity of his lights, his ability to capture his sitter’s countenance… But they are just as certain to, in their next breath, mumble something about not caring very much for his work. A noteworthy admittance, given that painters are generally suckers for “painterliness” (particularly in an age, like ours, when a decades-long dearth of technical skill has boomeranged into material fetishism). This is not to suggest that professional paint pushers are right in their judgments of paintings (usually they are not), but it is a convenient fact for this author who, after visiting the Metropolitan’s recent Sargent in Paris exhibition, was convinced of the paintings’ utter vacuity—and this despite Sargent’s apparent “virtuosity.”It is difficult to put one’s finger on what’s off. There is something a little lechy in Sargent’s gaze, not unlike the attention paid to girls by their older cousins: icky but probably not dangerous. But this is not enough to make a painting bad. There are many creepier, infinitely better paintings by Balthus. There is something tasteless in the displays of wealth in his depictions of his bourgeois clientele. But Velasquez’s paintings of kings and aristocrats retain their profundity, which suggests that the ostentation alone can't be the cause. Most interestingly, there is something that reminds one of images generated by AI, something beyond the performative brushiness of a digital paintbrush. One is tempted to claim: Sargent’s paintings lack soul. But (though right) such an articulation is not productive for criticism. The “soul” they lack is not that of the empirical person, John Singer Sargent, nor that of his sitters. (Lest we forget, misled by biopics and wall plaques, the empirical people behind a work are irrelevant to it.) The paintings themselves lack a soul, that special animation of an artwork that defines itself.

John Singer Sargent, Staircase in Capri, 1878. Oil on canvas, 32 × 18 inches.

They are soulless because Sargent was unfaithful to them, though his wayward desire was not for his sitters, but for their money. Doubtless, his clients patronised him because of his manual skills, best exemplified in Staircase in Capri, where the lilting brushstrokes transform the flat rectangle of the toned linen into the deep space of a rising staircase, as if by magic. They must have drooled over his ability to transform raw paint into depiction and, money in hand, commanded, “Make me such a thing!” And so he, rather than treating each painting as a problem to be solved, the solutions of which, concurrant with its form, would have been its very significance; rather than finding a new problem for each painting of each sitter, Sargent reached for a canned problem: the generic problem of luscious paint becoming represented thing. As in the portrait of Marie Buloz Pailleron, he’d sketch in a cloying background behind his subject, within which he would paint a flower over here, a flower over there, then—voila!—a glob of paint next to them, as if to say, “Look at the magic of paint! Look at the virtuosity of John Singer Sargent!” Canned problem, unreal solution. Hence, the emptiness that recalls images generated by Dall-e. In the paintings in which he seems to have tried for something deeper, as in The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, he gropes for significance on the wrong plane: that of symbolic meaning, the kind of meaning that Adorno calls thematic, which goes extinct with time as conventions change. Baby girl with a baby doll, young girl, pre-teen girls, giant vases prefiguring the rounded shape of pregnancy: one can get no further with this painting than the empty idea of motherhood looming over the girls’ futures. Only what is more than merely thematic content persists, and already, a mere 150 years later, this painting is substance-less. What appeared as virtuosic fades into cliché.This brings us to Doron Langberg’s Lovers at Night, just a few galleries and a flight of stairs away. The painting of the lovers, like Sargent’s paintings, pretends to the problem of paint becoming depiction. Also like Sargent’s paintings, it at first appears virtuosic(-ish). But the painting of the two lying figures, composed of performative brushstrokes with neon underpainting peeping through, their bodies nearly dissolved into abstraction, reveals itself to be substanceless. Its rhetorical meaning is clear: the act of painting (playing with variously-colored, luscious liquids and semi-solids) is analogous to the acts of eros undertaken in bed by lovers. In acts of love, two bodies dissolve into one; in art, the viewer, likewise, loses themselves in pleasure by luxuriating in the materiality of the painting. Art, like love, is hedonistic: pleasure, like art, is the highest achievement of humankind. This would all be well and good if the painting achieved this, but it remains on the plane of thematic content, mere syllogism rather than significant solution to a problem in paint. Although the paint that composes and surrounds the two lovers at first appears luscious, the closer one looks, the more contrived the image, the more stingy the paint’s application, the more performative the brushstrokes. Less does it seem that the figures came to be at once with the whirlwind of paint manipulation, more does it seem an academic sketch of figures, stylistically unfinished because the artist, much like the average adolescent pencil-wielder, doesn’t want to labor over digits or members. Allegedly a homoerotic encounter, only one of the figures is identifiably male, so even the “subversive” content is undefined, present in word only. Like the verdict on Sargent’s works, one might say that this thematic content has perished with age. But since the painting was made less than two years ago, it’s more likely that it was empty the day it was made.

Doron Langberg, Lovers at Night, 2023. Oil on linen, 80 x 96 inches.

About the Author:
Candice T. Seymour loves good artworks, is tired of mediocrity, suspects most artists don’t even like art, and hates nihilistic “critics”.
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Contributors

Bayless-Hall, Eric
          Reflections from a Dead End: Flora Yukhnovich’s Four Seasons at The Frick | February 19, 2026
          Perception and the Essay of Criticism | December 15, 2025

Elliott, Emmet
          Le Repas Frugal | January 5, 2026

Gregor, Anna
          Manner and Technique: Noel de Lesseps at Entrance | March 14, 2026
          Alla Prima Amnesia: Phoebe Helander at P·P·O·W | December 15, 2025

Herriot, Matthew
          Temporal Formalism | May 1, 2026

Klein, Arnold
          A Sense as Cold... | February 9, 2026
          Homage To— | December 15, 2025

Myers, Ian
          Image-Object | May 23, 2026

Riggins, Brock
          Raphael: Sublime Poetry | May 10, 2026

Seymour, Candice T.
          Why Paint? | April 12, 2026
          The Consolation of Illustration: Dana Schutz | January 18, 2026

Twist, Kid
          Something Human is Up There | May 13, 2026

Artists

Corp, Diva
          Why Paint? | by Candice T. Seymour | April 12, 2026

CrossLypka
          Image-Object | by Ian Myers | May 23, 2026

Daignault, Cynthia
          Why Paint? | by Candice T. Seymour | April 12, 2026

de Lesseps, Noel
          Manner and Technique: Noel de Lesseps at Entrance | by Anna Gregor | March 14, 2026

Gorchov, Ron
          Temporal Formalism | by Matthew Herriot | May 1, 2026

Helander, Phoebe
          Alla Prima Amnesia: Phoebe Helander at P·P·O·W | by Anna Gregor | December 13, 2025

Jones, Otis
          Temporal Formalism | by Matthew Herriot | May 1, 2026

Langberg, Doron
          Why Paint? | by Candice T. Seymour | April 12, 2026

Morandi, Giorgio
          Temporal Formalism | by Matthew Herriot | May 1, 2026

Picasso, Pablo
          Le Repas Frugal | by Emmet Elliott | January 6, 2026

Raphael
          Raphel: Sublime Poetry | by Brock Riggins | May 10, 2026

Schutz, Dana
          The Consolation of Illustration: Dana Schutz | by Candice T. Seymour | January 17, 2026

Shakespeare, William
          A Sense as Cold... | by Arnold Klein | February 9, 2026

Youngblood, Daisy
          Homage To— | by Arnold Klein | December 13, 2025

Yukhnovich, Flora
          Reflections from a Dead End: Flora Yukhnovich’s Four Seasons at The Frick | by Eric Bayless-Hall |
          February 19, 2026

Whitney, Stanley
          Temporal Formalism | by Matt Herriot | May 1, 2026

Letters to the Editor

On the Incoherence of Eric Bayless-Hall’s “Sense of Meaning” | A Letter to the Editor from Daran Mousý | April 3, 2026

A Brief Response to Alla Prima Amnesia | A Letter to the Editor from Ryan Johnson | December 17, 2026

Send your letter to editor [at] perseity [dot] nyc

A Brief Response to Alla Prima Amnesia
A Letter to the Editor

From Ryan Johnson, December 17, 2025
Re: Alla Prima Amnesia: Phoebe Helander’s Paintings from the Orange Room at P·P·O·W by Anna Gregor

Dear Editors,I’m starting to think that the honor of making capital-P Paintings will be awarded to very few, and very similar painters! It’s really not a surprise that Phoebe falls short of such a bruising, cerebral expectation of what a painting should be.Let me start with the author’s last paragraph. There is actually nothing stopping the author from putting a high degree of effort and attention into viewing the work. The author could (probably) bring their own chair in, make multiple visits, or ask to view works in private. We actually live in the freest time to experience paintings that ever existed. But of course, paintings don’t need to be encountered this way in order for real connection and meaning to be gleaned. The nice thing about a painting is that it doesn’t need to express every truth or formal-material connection in one canvas.After a nice introduction of the work, much of this writing has to do with the supposedly ahistorical “amnesia” of the paintings. I seriously doubt that Helander (with the educational baggage that comes from a BA from Hampshire College and an MFA from Yale) is capable of being ahistorical or an amnesiac of any sort. In fact, the crush of history and of the present clearly defines her motives in her essay. Is there something about her brushwork, color, or composition that supports the author’s claim that the paintings fail to “materialize loss”? If so I would love to hear more, because formal, concrete observation is lacking after the start of the review. The author all but says that alla prima painting is inadequate for conveying contemporary meaning, which I take many issues with. Other critics were able to pick out transcendent moments from this painter working with this kind of narrowed attention.The parenthetical “(for what could we viewers learn from the latter?)” might be the split in the road between my views and that of the author, who I deeply respect. Thank you for writing!

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