Maggie's Farm

You are an artist. You buy the paint, then what? A piece by Daniel Kunitz in the NY Sun about a new show at the MOMA titled "What is Painting?" - a quote:

Once upon a time, we knew what painting was. As recently as the 1960s, there was, if not a single consensus, then at least several broad and overlapping consensuses about what constituted a painting: It was two-dimensional and used pigments on some type of support, like a canvas; it was abstract, or it was representational; it was defined by its medium and sought to exclude the influence of all others, or it was defined by how prettily or truthfully it employed its medium, etc.

The delightful proposition of "What Is Painting?" — a broad survey of art from the 1960s to today, drawn from the Museum of Modern Art's contemporary collection — is that we have utterly lost our way: We no longer have any idea what painting is, and we are much better for it. Loosely chronological and with an equally relaxed thematic structure, the show makes its argument largely through the variety and quality of the work on view.

Read the whole thing. 

Image: A 1969 painting by William T. Williams in the MOMA's show, from the NY Sun article.