In response to other comments on this post, Dan Webb wrote:
‘To say that painting is dead, in the faintly apocalyptic cadences of deconstruction, is not so much to contest modernism as to accept its progressive and developmental narrative, and to say in effect that since that narrative is over with, there is nothing for painting to be-as if, unless it fell under the narrative, it could not really exist.’–Arthur Danto
In this era without a name we live in, free of modernism, or any ism at all for at least a generation, artists have the unprecedented freedom to make art in anyway shape or form we choose to make it. The result of that freedom means that painting is every bit as legit a path as anything else, unless the goal is to be fashionable, which is the replacement part for the avant-garde in our era.
After 1978, and probably well before then, there was no longer a dominant narrative in art. The ending of Modernism and a Greenbergian view of eliminating things as irrelevant because they didn’t fit into that narrative swept painting almost immediately back into the discussion (neo-expressionism, neo geo, etc.).
It kind of makes me think I should really take up painting.
Leave a Reply