erotic and abstract part 2

I'd like to really, really talk about a painting's, or art object's, qualities.  This is an undeveloped muscle in the critical apparatus.  I think we should be looking at objects formally, while understanding that, of course, content is part of form and form is part of content, and see how objects are working with content and abstraction now and what they really are doing.  I wish there was less embarrassment, less tension around a kind of formal and poetic response, where you describe something in terms of feeling or association, or you look at how something plays, rather than how it signifies, or how it deals with the literary, marketplace or distribution systems that lie around it.  Some critical language around art may fall short, and need to be refreshed, or be dropped.  -Amy Sillman

Well I'll drop it. To be sure.  Done.

Gotta say everybody here is happy to have that burden lifted, as happy as a cat with a ball.

The opposite of abstraction -or to say it another way, its complementary color -is realism.  And realistic paintings are not that good.  I respect them, but from my point of view, they're pictures.  You look at a picture and you recognize what's in it, and more than 50 percent of the joy is over -you're pretty much going downhill from there. -Josh Smith