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The painters, it seems, are secondary, the anthromorphic masks necessary for the
recognition and acceptance of the wholly inhuman practice of painting. Yet this focus
on the medium rather than the more common interest in the artist-personas or even
the painterly or aesthetic ideas of these artists strangely recalls the time when painting
as a medium was pushed off its perch at the top of the New York artworld heap
in the sixties and, despite its success in the eighties, never regained an unquestioned
legitimacy and the healthy self-confidence it possessed during the first half of the century.
This is still reflected in the schizms that define the contemporary art world. For some,
painting is back like Odysseus returning to Ithaka, disguised as a beggar and ready to
reveal himself as the true master of the house and destroy the suitors to his throne and
queen. For others, it may just be the latest throb in a slow death of modernist painting
or perhaps nostalgia for a simpler time when men were men and art was art. They see
no way back to a form so flat, so analog, or just so damn fucking bourgeois. For them,
conceptualism was and remains a decisive rupture in the history of art.
One danger here lies in affirming the facile opposition between conceptualism and painting
that is already a major faultline running through the heart of the artworld and criticism.
Doubting the value of this distinction may be, I believe, the first step toward thinking about
painting and contemporary art in a different way, a new way that is nevertheless not depen-
dent upon the new for its edge.
Certainly, no new program has been announced with this latest flash of interest in painting,
and that is just fine. Why then is it back? Is it out of plain old worldweariness with the
sheer quantity of conceptualism now become equally rote and academic? Has the magic
wand of fashionability been waved in its direction? It is likely in part all of these, this last
return, if one can call it that, but if one is to seriously consider painting anew, then it seems
to me that we must return to the scene of the crime, the Oedipal moment of patricide
(and incest?). This moment is minimalism.
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