paintings and Paintings
September 23, 2026 | by Anna Gregor
▯▮
There are paintings, and then there are paintings––I’ll capitalize the latter. Anyone who has Seen a Painting will feel the Truth in this distinction, and anyone who has felt the dissatisfaction of merely seeing a mere painting—and who hasn’t?––will either suspect that such a distinction exists or turn away from the work in front of them in search of meaning elsewhere.
Who can blame us for doing so? We’ve been taught that a Painting causes profound feelings (cue the cliché of crying in front of a Rothko). No wonder if we don’t immediately feel moved––and we usually don’t––we might worry that we’re missing something. So, we may turn inward, retreating to subjective experience by treating the work as an occasion for associations and private pleasures. (“Well, I like it.”) Or we might turn outward, in search of an objective authority––a wall plaque, art historian, or market forecaster––to tell us what the work is “about” or what its value is, historically or monetarily. (“They say she’s one of the hottest artists this year.”) Or we may lose faith in Painting entirely, denouncing it as mere decoration, propaganda, or luxury good and calling for its critique, subversion, or death. All of these ways of turning away are complicated by our feeling that, nonetheless, this thing hanging on the wall before our eyes is, or once was, or ought to be, meaningful.
The capital P feels jarring to us, accustomed as we are to the claim that all art is equally valuable, that art’s value lies in the beholder because artistic experience is subjective (as any high schooler is quick to preach). It conjures nightmares of elitist hierarchies, of calls for a return to the fetters of tradition, of Platonic forms in an ideal realm in relation to which the things we make are only imperfect shadows.—Fear not. There are no, and never will be, determinate criteria according to which we can prove that a painted object belongs to the upper- or lower-case class. On the contrary, it is because there are no determinate criteria by which to judge works, and because we are accustomed to turning to the market and art historical narratives instead of evaluating and making claims for our experience of the work itself, that this distinction feels necessary—because, even without shared criteria for judging, we still feel that there must be more to painting than making visually pleasing objects or propositions about art. There must be more to Seeing than masturbatory pleasure or pedantic illustrations of a story of art.
This essay is not a call for adherence to a certain style, technique, subject matter, or process in painting. Rather, it aims to sketch what makes a painting a Painting, in the most general sense, without the superficial dictates of appearance and aboutness that -isms and movements are so often distracted by, and to outline a way of seeing (Seeing) in a time when, benumbed by visual stimuli and accustomed to a division of aesthetic labor in which we readily defer to specialists, we presume that the artwork before our eyes is not enough––that our eyes are not enough; that there must be something behind or beyond the work in front of us that makes it meaningful (viz. the causal chain of historical events that led to its production, the social structures it is an illustration of, the artist’s intentions, or our subjective associations). But we cannot See the Painting––the Painting doesn’t appear––if we look beyond or behind it, inward or outward. How an object appears––what an object does—what it is––depends on our orientation toward it. So, we must begin with basic orienting questions: Where are we? And how did we get here?
▯▮
A urinal, a stack of Brillo Boxes, a fabricated cube: the struggle between these nontraditional objects that claimed the title of “art” and the traditional medium-specific fine arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture was fought and finished in the twentieth century, so that, by the time my generation was born at the turn of the century, the once-revolutionary idea that anything can be art had become convention. Raised firmly within this new paradigm, we learned about this revolution second-hand—not through any real regulatory pressures of what would or wouldn’t be accepted as art, what could or couldn’t be conceived as art, but from stories told by texts and teachers who, remembering (or imagining) their own struggles, behaved as if there continued to be a tradition that actively arbitrated what could be art. Before we were even in art school, art institutions and the market had shown themselves eager to embrace nontraditional artworks, including so-called conceptual art and institutional critique. But our education lagged behind, still centered around “subverting the tradition” and “challenging convention”—around being revolutionary, new. Instead of developing a familiarity with materials and techniques—or even the most important thing an artist can learn: a love for individual artworks—we learned the jargon of revolution.
But the conventional medium-specific distinctions between painting, sculpture, and architecture, which had regulated artistic production for centuries in the West and which had excluded anything that didn’t fit these categories, had already been overthrown. Our revolt was empty. We were free, in a way, but didn’t know what to do with this freedom. And having only learned a critical attitude toward art and a distrust for earnestness, having never learned to See what makes art worthwhile––what makes good art Good––we found ourselves unable to begin to solve the problem: What to make, and how to make it, when anything can be art. That is, how to make something revolutionary when everything is permissible.
▯▮
The Western story of art, which spread like a virus through colonialism and global capitalism, is a plot of revolution, progress—the new. We are taught by textbooks and teachers, podcasts and wall plaques, biopics and bestsellers that art is at the vanguard of society, that the artistic avant-garde pushes the boundaries of staid convention, liberating us all. No matter that it’s difficult to fit most of human existence into this revolutionary narrative. We anachronistically lump artifacts made across millennia under the term “art,” appealing to a supposedly primordial creative impulse that is presumed essentially human and in conflict with the essentially artificial restraints of society. Our cultural martyr, the artist, is the individual—outcast, exile, suicide—who revolts against societal norms. The artworks she leaves behind contain the universal truths discovered beyond conventional confines. But this is only part of the story the West has told itself.
In an attempt to avoid anachronism, another, broader, story is told that better accounts for the above understanding of art and the revolutionary hangover that still grips us today. We are told that from the first stencil of a hand on a cave wall around 64,000 BCE to the quattrocento, “art,” as we use the term, did not exist. The human-made objects from these millennia that we now call art––paintings, sculptures, monuments––were not distinguished as art at all but were, rather, incorporated into daily life or ritual practice. The artisans who made these practical or cultic objects were largely anonymous. They learned their craft through apprenticeships to masters, and their production was highly regulated by conventions. Indeed, we’re told, the ancient etymological predecessors of the term (τέχνη in Ancient Greek and ars in Latin) denoted something closer to practical knowledge or craft.
This, they say, all changed at the start of the pre-modern chapter of art, supposedly beginning sometime around 1500, somewhere in Europe, when painting, sculpture, and architecture are first distinguished as the fine arts, together elevated to the level of a liberal art (alongside rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, history, and geometry) in contradistinction to skilled crafts (mere τέχναι or artes) like weaving and metalsmithing. From here on, artists as biographical figures, no longer anonymous, rise to prominence and begin to be praised not for their craftsmanship but for their genius. It takes a genius to achieve art’s goal: the imitation of nature, God’s creation, in a specific medium. The genius-painter is to painting as God is to nature; paint to the dust from which Adam was formed. Progress first appears here as the motive of this story, so that the work of each artist is measured by how far it surpasses their master’s and approaches, or even strives to surpass, their Creator’s. So Giotto goes further than Cimabue, Leonardo further than Verrocchio, and Titian further than Bellini, each, in turn, developing new techniques and technologies for naturalistic representation, like chiaroscuro and mathematical perspective.
This pre-modern chapter of art’s mimetic progress extends through the mid-nineteenth century. Then, whether due to the invention of photography, the strict regulation of the academy, or the French Revolution––different storytellers differ on the cause––the plot takes a turn. In this next chapter, titled “Modernism,” art, the storytellers say, becomes self-conscious. It turns from a preoccupation with merely mimicking the appearance of nature to inquiring into the essence of its own nature: colored paste on a surface (painting), modeled forms in three dimensions (sculpture), and functional space (architecture). For painting, the plot progresses from the flatness of Manet’s Olympia to the spiritual abstraction of Malevich’s White on White to the material record of expressive gesture in Pollock’s drip paintings. Through self-consciousness of its particular nature, art promised to attain universality—whence the caricature of the modernist painter, locked away in his studio, writing manifestos and believing that his inquiry into colored paste would lead to universal truth. It is in this chapter that cultural objects considered beyond the pale in the pre-modern chapter, so preoccupied as that era was with mimesis that art with any other end was inconceivable, are first anachronistically subsumed under the term “art.” The story of art is rewritten so that the reach of art includes objects that can be forced to fit into the medium-specific categories of the Western fine arts: cave paintings, African masks, Japanese prints.
Then, somewhere around the 1960s, they tell us, a transition to a new chapter begins: “Postmodernism” (where we allegedly still are now). Things that look unlike anything that has been called art in the past chapters––first, readymade objects that, far from fitting neatly into the categories of the fine arts, aren’t even made by an artist’s hand—then, fleeting happenings—then, immaterial concepts––all begin to claim the honorific title “art.” The story is rewritten again, with a new paradigm of progress. Art, they claim, far from being a liberating force that leads us all to universal truth, is itself an elitist institution, regulating taste and cutting culture off from the truly vital aspects of life. We shouldn’t have to leave the world for the disciplinary spaces of museum and gallery to access art. Life is art. So the avant-garde set to tearing down the distinction between art and life, high and low, elite and mass, railing against the institutions and conventions that regulated artistic production.
But today, these once-controversial medium-unspecific objects and occurrences have been canonized. Duchamp’s Fountain marks a chapter in art history books. A can of Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit No. 014 sits comfortably on a pedestal in MoMA. With a story of art that incorporates Tehching Hsieh’s durational performances, Lee Lozano’s withdrawal from the artworld, Robert Ryman’s white paintings, Fred Wilson’s curatorial interventions, and Alan Kaprow’s dental hygene, the medium-specific criteria that identified art for the past six hundred years in the West have been thoroughly overthrown.—So much so that Cattelan’s readymade Comedian, a banana duct-taped to the wall first shown in 2019, blew no minds, perhaps elicited a few chuckles and eye rolls, inspired a Burger King Super Bowl ad, then sold for $6.2 million to a tech bro who *drumroll* ate the banana—but not, sadly, the certificate that constitutes the work. The avant-garde impulse to undercut cultural values has been flattened into a lucrative joke.
The orientating narrative of art—first as a progression toward the perfect imitation of nature, then as self-conscious inquiry into its own nature in pursuit of universal truth, then as revolt against elitist conventions in search of the vitality of life—has collapsed. Anything can be art. The story of art qua progress is over.
▯▮
Yet, although the grand narrative arc has crumbled, we still stumble over the sediment left behind. The dream of revolution survives, perverted, in the consumer’s taste for novelty expressed by our habitual consumption of content, insubstantial and dissatisfying but always (kind of) new. The drive to discovery has atrophied into the insider thrill of recognizing an academic citation, reference, or meme. The admiration for genius is diverted by claims of discovering dead or self-titledly self-taught artists. Plotless and pathless within a commodity culture that immediately metabolizes anything that seems new, we, suckled on the story of revolution, aren’t sure where to turn to or from.
Some have looked for orientation in amendments to the story of art, acknowledging fine art’s, especially painting’s, intimacy with early capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism, criticizing who has been written into and out of the story of art, and championing art histories instead of a unified narrative. Some hold onto the idea of revolution but, without substantial artistic conventions to react against, shift their attention to real and—today, really frightening—attempts by the American government to regulate social norms, turning to social practice or leaving art altogether for community organizing and politics. Others call for technological progress through the incorporation of digital technologies, the internet, and AI, while still others turn to technologies from the past, drawing on historical techniques or trying to revive the stricter artistic conventions of bygone times in search of the comforts that come with unproblematic convention, dreaming of atelier easel painting and clinging to the superficial matters of paint handling, color relations, and shape management. But what we need is not simply an edited story or a new semblance of progress. Stories, after all, are written retrospectively. The heroes of the past, too, were groping in the dark, individual work by individual work.
No matter how we long for a story to tell us where to go, stories of progress are unviable when anything can be art. We no longer can be scandalized by abstraction, offended by a readymade, shocked by a performance or institutional critique just because the work is abstract, readymade, fleeting, or critical. Newness in art—today and always—can only happen on a deeper level.
Indeed, the end of the stories of art have revealed the truth of what art is: with no narrative and no determinate criteria to tell us what is or isn’t art, or whether it is good or bad, each artwork must create its own story, its own conventions, its own standard of judgment according which we viewers can come to see what it wants to be and thereby judge whether it succeeds or fails. An artwork must be a singular individual that creates its own, new logic. This, I’m inclined to say, has always been true of artworks—a truth perverted into a narrative of progress that in turn obscured the very truth it grew out of. It’s easier, after all, to hear a story than to attend to an individual in all its complexity.
In a sense, we find ourselves in a similar position to those before “art,” albeit on the other side of a progressive story of art—after art. Like the worshipers of early Christian icons—those images of Madonna and Christ, painted according to a formula, but idiosyncratic in temperament and miraculous ability—we can only access an artwork through a one-on-one relationship, attentive and tentatively trusting, that lets the work reveal itself to us. Our position differs, however, from these iconolaters insofar as this encounter cannot be a new age-y performance of pseudo-magical experience, lacking, as we are, unifying religion or ritual in our post-industrial, utterly quantified, technological age. Today, our individual encounter with an artwork must acknowledge what has been revealed to us about art over the past centuries, through its various stories:
An artwork is a representational, material-conceptual, convention-defying individual—whatever the limits of that individual may be: the borders of a single canvas, a series, an infinitely reproducible image or video, an unrecorded performance, an installation—an individual that, through its own organization of material, its idiosyncratic logic, shows us something new.
▯▮
So, we find ourselves at a time and in a place where anything can be art. But just because anything can be art, it doesn’t follow that everything is art—especially those objects that fit neatly into the medium-specific categories from a few chapters ago. Since the medium-specific criteria for what counts as art have shown themselves insufficient, it can only be a hangover from stories of the past to presume that anything made within those medium-specific boundaries is a priori art. Just because something is painted, it is not given that it is art. Not all paintings are Paintings.
New difficulties arise. No predetermined criteria can help us See, at first glance, or second, or third, whether a painted work is a Painting. We cannot judge from mere appearance, technique or its want, subject matter or lack thereof. Nor can we turn to any authority to tell us which painted objects deserve the capital P. We can only be convinced that a painting is a Painting through our experience of what it does by means of its organization of matter, and the ideas that grow out of and give form to that matter, which can accommodate any political content or visual appearance. Only we can be convinced. You and I, and anyone else who takes the time and puts in the attention to really look, are the judges. Artworks are sites of controversy, and potential communion.
Because Paintings are mute and static, they require a viewer to do anything. The Painting exists between the viewing subject and the painted object, in the reciprocal play between the viewer’s subjective perception, on the one hand, and the objective qualities of the painting, on the other—and, on another level, between the judgments of different viewing subjects who triangulate their experiences to share the world a Painting expresses. A Painting, thus, has three aspects: the objective, the subjective, and the intersubjective.
A Painting must risk its self-destruction in pursuit of its own perfection. It risks destruction by denying itself the comfort of clichés, beloved by convention and the market, pushing itself to the point where there’s no familiar way out. It pursues perfection (that unfashionable word) by trusting that new meaning can be made by destroying and transforming those inherited but empty clichés, from the unintelligibility of the necessary near-destruction of its becoming. It is on this scale—that of the individual work—that newness in art is possible, not on the scale of novel sensory experience, nor that of art historical revolutionary plots.
A Painting, in this pursuit, surpasses the subjectivity of its maker, becoming more than mere private gush, thereby developing a logic of its own––that unfreezable, unsatisfactorily articulable logic of living things. (Here is where the miraculous has space to slip in, if you’re so inclined. For Paintings, with their living logics, are, in a sense, miraculous. They, so to speak, have souls, and, in showing us their souls, reassure us of our own.) There are as many different logics as there are Paintings (as many souls as individual human beings). This notion of Painting cannot categorically exclude any style, subject matter, technique, size, color scheme, material, beauty, ugliness, etc. It doesn’t even require that a Painting be made of paint.
The viewing subject, too, must risk her own destruction, insofar as she must surrender herself to the Painting’s logic. We, in a sense, are the categories and concepts, habits and inclinations, by which we see the world. We are inclined to subsume new or nuanced things under the givens of our worldview. But a Painting takes what is given and transforms, deforms, reforms it, threatening the stability of our idea of the world, our self, without endangering life or limb. Seeing requires that we subordinate our world to the object’s, so we can discover a new, artificial world, a microcosm of meaning, accompanied by a conviction that what we See is actually there, discoverable by others, since we didn’t simply project our desires and associations onto it. We may, of course, be mistaken. But this is the precarity of artistic experience, the stakes of which are whether we can share a world.
Seeing takes more time than we customarily give to paintings. We, accustomed to scrolling through images, are too quick to look away, averse to effortful engagement, worried that we don’t know enough to “get it.” But anyone can See a Painting. To See a Painting is to overcome the clichés through which we usually see, to perceive something in its individuality, the way it wants to be seen—the way it is—without applying concepts external to it but rather discovering those immanent to it. It is even possible to See the Painting in the unsuccessful painting: the picture of perfection it points toward and failed to attain.
When I claim to See a Painting, I claim universality, a kind of objectivity, for my subjective experience, knowing full well that you may disagree. It requires the conviction, acquired only through loving attention, that, if we looked together, I could bring you to See what I do—and the attendant anxiety that you might not see it, or might not want to see it, that I may be wrong, or delusional, or that we may not share enough of a world to arrive at the Painting together. The capital P can never be proven––there is no expert, no final judge. There are only our provisional, but no less convinced, judgments, and our attempts to show what we See to each other, the resulting accommodation of new perspectives and changing minds. But by functioning as a site where individual viewers with different perspectives can work to See it together, a Painting promises experiential reassurance that we can, maybe, share a world. By creating its own logic from the rubble of cliché conventions, a Painting affirms the possibility that our conventions and laws, concepts and categories, can change—even if the change doesn’t yet extend to the empirical world.
Mark Rothko, No. 13 (Red, White on Yellow), Oil and acrylic with powdered pigments on canvas, 1958. 95 1/4 × 81 3/8”
Mark Rothko, No. 5/No. 22, Oil on canvas, 1950. 117 x 107 1/8 inches.
This is a humble sort of newness. It will not change the course of history or alter the functioning of institutions that apply pressures to artistic production. But it is a tangible newness available to anyone, a glimpse of the possibility of coherence in an incoherent world. So we painters push on, groping in the dark with no narrative light to guide us, taking leaps after an unknown and as yet unformed logic, trusting in the possibility of a perfection—a beauty—a meaning—that has yet to be revealed to the world but could be, at least to those who try to See it.
Second revised edition of paintings and Paintings, published on the occasion of Anna Gregor’s Collected Essays at D.D.D.D. Pictures, 79 Leonard Street, SBE, New York, NY 10013 (September 9, 2026 - October 10, 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.