Painting: a minor art?


Painting may no longer be the royal road to art. What does a painter do with the recognition that his or hers is just one idiom among many, and perhaps a minor one at that? Is this a bad thing? The overbearing rhetoric and portentous ambitions of the “grand machines” of the nineteenth-century Salons are now provided by wall-sized video projections; by installations (modeled on those found in history museums) combining photographic blow-ups, text panels, and objects of material culture; or at minimum, by large-scale light box transparencies—that is, through means that artists have borrowed from the realms of cinema, pedagogy, and advertising.

In this context, painting may seem quaintly marginal to the games of power. And given the overwhelming institutional predilection for installation over painting, demonstrated by the international biennials and other engines of career certification, anyone setting to work as a painter these days would have to view the medium’s minor status as a positive value in itself, perhaps as a polemical choice against the aspiration to “importance,” which is a political rather than an aesthetic category…


The full text is published in "tema celeste" No. 85, May-June 2001.




Barry Schwabsky