Painting, sculpting, disappearing?

[Belacqua]

What I like about the visual arts are the aspects that resist narative...i.e. what cannot be coveyed by words.

I also want to be wary of a kind of stripping-away which happened in the post-War arts, particularly in New York but of course elsewhere, too. 

There was a movement, with Hoffmann, and Greenberg, and Rosenberg, and Rothko, and other influential thinkers in the visual arts. And Philip Glass and John Cage and others in music. The idea was that pure painting -- real painting -- is only about the paint. Everybody was supposed to recognize that a painting is just colored stuff on a flat thing, and acknowledge that and not dishonestly pretend it is something else, like a person's face or a view through a window. Purity and honesty demanded minimalism. 

I'm not criticizing any of these individuals. A lot of what they did was wonderful. But I think they indirectly had an unfortunate influence, and there are a lot of people making paintings now who are making use of only a tiny fraction of what art can do, and traditionally has done. 

Of course a painting can be viscerally, unmediatedly beautiful. But it can operate on many other levels as well, and these may enrich and support one another. If you think about one of those fantastic Titian paintings, like the Ariadne in London, we gain more (and lose nothing) by learning, little by little, what the characters are doing, and what stories and traditions they refer to, and how Titian is responding to other artists, and the full spectrum of what that painting is and refers to. It is worthwhile to look at even if we know none of that, but nothing is lost by knowing more. And I think that a painting which reveals more of itself over many viewings is something to respect and treasure.