The Most Common Complaints About Virtosu Art Gallery abstract oil painting gallery, and Why They're Bunk

I have been an abstract painter for around 25 years, and have taught drawing and painting to undergraduates for almost as long.

From both perspectives, I've concluded that painting, in terms of its influence on modern culture, continues to be marginalized.

In actuality, among non-painters, painters and many artists alike, it's quietly acknowledged that painting's effect on the culture is nil. Painting is viewed as, at best, an activity for a few diehards. At worst, it is considered destructively elitist, a part of the"oppressor culture" of dead white European males. The public -- attached to computers, television, and films -- barely registers painting . The only question is whether there is any audience at all for painting and, if there is to preserve it.

This essay is a defense of abstract painting, the seemingly irrelevant and most difficult to comprehend sort of painting that exists. By limiting my topic to abstract painting -- which concentrates on structure and builds an entire flat reality from color, surface, shape, traces of the hand, mistakes, and adjustments -- I can best address the question of why anyone should continue to make paintings, when so many more visually powerful websites are available.

In safeguarding abstract painting, I must toss overboard some excess baggage. I take as my model the iconoclastic painter Ad Reinhardt, who thought that the claims of the Abstract Expressionists in'50s and the 1940s amounted to poppycock. To give painting back its dignity, he put forth, both in his own paintings and in a collection of"dogmatic" statements, exactly what abstract painting isn't. Allow me, in the spirit of Ad Reinhardt, to set forth my list of what painting isn't:

Abstract painting is not a vehicle for political or social change, even if its leaders believed it was. Today, even more than in Reinhardt's day, if even a figurative painter paints a picture that argues a specific social or political point of view, its effect -- in a society bombarded with books, magazines, papers, photographs, movies, tv, video, and computers -- is ridiculously tiny. The chances are even fewer with abstract painting.

Second, abstract painting isn't avant-garde. It is, although it was in 1915. In terms of its ability to shock anyone -- the rallying cry of this avant-garde that is now-defunct -- painting now is feeble when compared with the power of the media mentioned above.

Abstract painting hasn't been, and likely never will be, broadly popular. Yes, gallery of abstract oil painting virtosuart.com its leaders -- Malevich, Kandinsky, Mondrian held utopian hopes but they have been demonstrated .

Finally painting can't offer a lot of what we call Deep Hidden Meaning, in the way that religion or philosophy can. Put bluntly painting can't provide a substitute for God -- the loss of whom is the earmark of modernism. The ability of abstract painting to move people is considerably poorer than that of other arts, such as novels, theater, music, or poetry.

To continue at a more moderate, but no less enthusiastic spirit than that of Reinhardt -- here is what abstract painting can do:

It provides what I'll call Little Hidden Meaning. To a viewer that can look at a still picture (for some, a difficult prospect), and who is educated enough to place an abstract painting in the context of contemporary art as a whole, abstract painting offers a de facto philosophical point of view on life. There's a belief, coming from our attachment and from our own narcissistic age, that abstraction is about self-expression. In the broadest sense it is, of course, but it is also about ideas -- that the intricate struggle between order and chaos, by way of instance, or how the flux of the organic world modifies the rigor of geometry.

Secondly painting can enable us to be silent. Painting makes allowing for a slow waltz.

Third art offers a counter to the glut of items of our society. An abstract painting is part of the material world, a thing, of course. However, it reminds people of a planet. It suggests the old concept, now hardly remembered, that there might be a hidden, underlying order, which the transience of life's things can not affect.

Fourth, abstract painting is often, quite simply, beautiful -- although that assertion is subject to enormous dispute. Artists from the birth of modernism on have substituted the pursuit of truth for the pursuit of beauty -- reality in perception, truth in shape, truth in materials. Many artists -- rightly -- are suspicious of the very idea of this gorgeous, because it so easily petrifies into some rigid standard. Once locked into place,"beauty" obliterates the wide array of subtle variations within it.

Most baffling of all, hidden within the notion of beauty and folded up are values. Beauty implies an inequality in the way things look. If there's beauty, there is everything in between, and ugliness.

But some people can not help their"elitist," or meritocratic, impulses when it comes to aesthetics, and are struck dumb by how utterly beautiful an abstract painting can be.

A fifth virtue of abstract painting is that it is not a story, particularly not one from the most easily accessible facet of culture, which is all stories. We are bombarded with endless tales -- in television shows, advertisements, novels, movies, and virtual-reality games. By means of telling stories We're constantly teaching and preaching, persuading and dissuading. Picking up on that aspect of our civilization, many non-abstract painters have added stories, or"narratives," into their paintings.

A final virtue of painting is its very uncamera-like nature. The camera is so powerful that many people have gotten to the point where they can see the world only photographically or cinematically, and have lost the ability to see it in other ways. Before long, people will see the world only digitally.

What abstract painting provides us at the end of the 20th century is, in sum, a useless non-story, a non-blinking"thereness," without reference to anything other than itself and its own heritage. It defies translation into data, information, entertainment, rational image, or any kind of narrative. It presents an ineffable balance of sensation, experience, and knowledge. In the midst of a world in which what we see is morphing into something different, abstract painting is among the few things left that allow us to observe the possibility of something's staying constant.

If what I am saying about the virtues of abstract painting is true, then why isn't there more interest in this artwork? It won't do to start listing all of the abstract painters around, since the point is that few people pay much attention to them, compared with figurative artists generally, or new-media artists working with video and sound installations. Yes, abstract painters still exist, however they are an aging bunch, for the most part ignored. How can it be that abstract painting, a significant player in most of 20th-century art, has arrived at this sorry point, where it's barely a contender?

And how can it be that painting in general, not just abstract painting, has arrived at this point?

The invention of photography allowed anybody, even someone who had no drawing or painting skills, to fix an image of the real world on a flat surface quickly and accurately. The painter suddenly seemed slow and insignificant in his way of replicating the look of reality.

More important, photography threw into question the whole raison d'etre of painting. For if the camera was recording the world through light rays bouncing off objects, then painting, in contrast, looked subjective, even fictive. If painters couldn't compete with the camera in mimicking reality, they would assert an alternative objective truth: All individual perceptions are true -- at least to the perceiver -- and therefore equally valid.

That fundamental change in outlook changed the look of art in the modern era. It was a shift that is, faking, telling lies -- to aesthetic intent, which relied on telling the truth, known by artists as being true.

After Freud and Darwin, artists didn't concern themselves with beauty anymore, except as a byproduct, or an aside, as they played and manipulated with form. It would protect beauty by separating it from damaging scientific analysis, and leave it alone as a"subjective" judgment. Philosophy yielded its position as objective interpreter of the world to science. Science then broke loose, leaving everything behind, as subjective rubble, including philosophy that was poor. This rubble reconstituted itself as relativism's substance -- the notion that aesthetic and moral judgments are subject to flux. Relativism had been around at least since Plato, of course, but the age marked the victory of the position.

Relativism's hatchet man is irony. To condense an awful lot of the background of 20th-century art into a single sentence: The past 80 years have consisted essentially of a battle between the ironists, who have reveled in the impossibility of universal truths, and the holdout universalists, who've tried to rebuild classical philosophical truths in a modern visual language. In other words, it's been Duchamp versus Mondrian. And Duchamp is the winner -- although more by forfeit.

It required Duchamp a while to win. Until then, when Pop Art burst Abstract Expressionism's bubble, it had been coasting on its inflated reputation; at that point, Pop Art sprouted in the smart, witty seed which Duchamp had implanted a half-century earlier. Pop Art consisted mainly of paintings on canvas to be certain. But they were self-destructive. Pop Art's implied message was that it was the appropriated images that counted -- the Campbell's soup cans, Marilyn Monroe -- rather than the manner in which paint was placed on the canvas. Painting had always been centered on the artist's signature, but now painting concerned the content or image.

Since World War II, our culture has steadily evolved to what we recognize as"mass culture" -- one in which millions of people's interests are concurrently and speedily gratified through popular music, movies, sports, and celebrities. Fewer and fewer people care no more about the slow action called painting. Beginning in early'70s and the late'60s , young musicians, attracted to the new art forms of installation, performance, and video art, abandoned painting in droves. They had grown up with TV and stone'n' roster; they were stylish, smart, and eloquent; they knew and embraced the seductiveness and power of popular culture, and they wanted in on it.

We have arrived at a branch in the art world: hip and trendy on the one hand, reclusive and out-of-it on the other. How can continue in the face of that?

They must separate themselves rather than strive to become players. Abstract painters have to become, philosophically speaking, difficult and cantankerous, because to survive, they have to reassert the differentiation -- discredited by postmodernists -- between"high" art and"low" art. They must reargue the case for high art -- an art requiring a subtle, sensitive, experienced, and even exceptional viewer. Abstract artists are making . They need to admit this to find meaning in painting requires some help, and even some work.

And painters need to celebrate loudly, rather than apologize for, the character of the artwork. These artists work within a rectangle, they use paint on canvas, and they follow a century of traditions of painting. The revolution itself -- the moment that invented abstraction -- must have been electrifying, but that moment is over. For their audiences and abstract painters, the experience is profoundly different from what it was due to their forebears. Abstract art is a quiet pleasure rather than a thrill that is dizzying. The conventions are created, as in baseball, and to derive pleasure from abstraction requires accepting its fundamental rules rather than always deconstructing them.

Yes art is elitist, and artists should be up-front about that. However, enjoy and you don't need to stop loving The X-Files or the struggles to understand abstract art. Nor do you need to be a white male of royal blood. Yes, it is a product of culture, but are computers, airplanes, penicillin, and this essay. There are abstract painters, and patrons of painting, of all races and both sexes.

Today, many, if not most, young artists trying to get a rung up don't care one whit about painting or its own tradition in Western history. Although a lot of young artists indeed refer to their own racial heritage in their art, the problem for them is much more identity than aesthetics. The point is, most young artists (whatever their race or gender ) prefer to see history, especially art history, as a massive amount of information that at times is helpful for rummaging around in for ironic references, but which mostly is a pain in the neck and best left ignored.

One premise: It is history, used correctly can be taken from him by us, if we pull back from the abyss of Nietzsche's picture of our condition. But what is the use of history? People now emphasise it. Since they're convinced that knowledge is a smokescreen for power they wish to know and who's doing the telling.

Unfortunately it is only when history's non-ironic use is coupled with the particular desire to make images that the artist, in particular, can learn the language of abstract painting's meaning and painted graphics. No matter what, some people -- even some artists -- will not"get" abstract painting, for reasons that vary from their belief that all art is political for their poor visual aptitude. In the end painting will attract an audience more likely than to watch Sarah McLachlan on MTV to read the Aeneid.

But small because its audience may be, abstract painting can say something. Abstract painters do not start their paintings in a vacuum. They build on the foundation of historical abstraction. Paintings are caused by an accumulation of mistakes, wrong turns, corrections, and settlements. Painters paint the way rebelling against the options and the givens, the purposeful actions and the injuries and building on. An abstract painting, then, offers the perfect metaphor for life.

George Orwell said that every man at 50 has. In virtual time and space, there is not any face. Everything is a toggle option that wipes out the previous smiles or frowns and obliterates"bad" or"wrong" choices. Because all signs of it is concurrently destroyable and retrievable in a computer image, of course, there exists the notion of a mistake. The last image does not have any wrinkles, when we take away the ability to make a mistake in art, one which can not be wiped out. It carries only a thin, rigid veneer, such as the continuously stretched faces of Park Avenue matrons. In a glance, those ladies look fine. But a longer look yields blankness. It's through our mistakes and, indeed, our sins, both in life and in art, we get the capacity for improvisation and redemption.

Before modernism, painting was the noise in the culture, because attention was attracted by it. The culture is the sound, and painting -- notably abstract painting -- attracts little attention in the culture at large or in the art world. Abstract painting's saving virtue is that it offers us quiet, not sound today. There's indeed the continuous level of everything a catastrophe at the end of the century, and the passing of stillness. Abstract painting cannot alter our culture, but neither may installation art nor new-media attempts at appropriation, no matter how informed and smart they are. Those art forms that appropriate the popular media are doomed to seem forever pale in comparison to them, or worse, to be sucked down into their vast black hole. Abstract painting's power is this: It is a world beautifully separate from our postmodern, materialistic, morphing, ironic, stylish age.

Laurie Fendrich is an associate professor of fine arts at Hofstra University.