A student at one of Los Angeles' premier art schools recently asked a question that had been troubling her for some time. It surprised me.
Her problem was the dismissive, sometimes patronizing attitude toward painting her faculty and fellow students -- not all of them, but enough to notice -- regularly tossed her way. Painting is what she wanted to do, not video, installation, digital photography, performance or any of the other myriad art forms that have proliferated since the 1970s. But constantly defending her desire to be a painter was beating her down.
Part of my surprise came from a simple clash with daily experience: I see lots of new paintings in gallery and museum shows -- more than ever before. Doesn't she?
"When they sneer and say I'm foolish because painting is obsolete, I don't know what to say to them," she said, sighing.
Oh, I thought, that old chestnut. Art, like science and technology, used to be discussed in terms of progress. That meant an ancient practice like painting could become obsolete, like absolute monarchy or 8-track tapes. We don't think that way anymore.
"That's easy," I replied. "Say, 'Thank you.' And mean it."
The short explanation for expressing gratitude is that every young artist should take hostile groupthink -- the promiscuous pressure to conform -- as a cue that she's on the right track. Those pressures can be especially acute at school. That's one hazard of the current pervasiveness of academic training for artists.
The long explanation is -- well, longer, although not by much. It begins with another question: What century is this?
Lingering animus toward painting is so end-of-the-20th century. Painting hasn't been the black sheep of the art family for a couple of decades now, except in academic backwaters of provincial thought.
It wasn't always so. But the recent change in fortune of painting's status -- at least outside the academy -- turns out to be revealing.
In 1975, art critic Max Kozloff took note of a widespread indifference to painting among his scribbling colleagues. Writing in Artforum, then the leading intellectual art journal, he noted that "for at least five years . . . a whole mode, painting, has been dropped gradually from avant-garde writing, without so much as a sigh of regret."
Painting seemed to have evaporated.
