Wednesday, August 22, 2018

“Painting: Now & Forever, Part III” at Greene Naftali & Matthew Marks


(Greene NaftaliMatthew Marks)*

"Painting Now and Forever I-III"
"Painting Forever!"
"The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting"
"Painting Now" is unfortunately a book though.
and "Now that's what I call painting" seems also to have been a show in a Chicago gallery Scott projects.

*Interestingly the first "Now that's What I Call Music" was released in the US shortly after Part I, in 1998.

As Frankel said of Part II in Artforum it's sort of like "blowing your trumpet in the middle of a marching band." Painting, then as now and possibly forever, isn't in need of cheerleaders, painting sort of auto-blows itself. "But there's some good paintings in here!" as the reviews state. A survey, taking stock of the land so as to produce a map. Great. There's more figuration, color, surrealism, goo. Go look at 2008 here or here. Remember that? Guyton, Price, Smith, Walker, the concentration on the production as excuse to the product? The market was about to fall out the floor in 2 months but it was built back up on the mindless dead who took the 2008ists at their word: painting meant a concept for its execution, pressing print, spraying paint, screen-printing bricks to prove the wall you were looking. The fallout left a vacuum to be filled with those picking up the remains, and we were berated by it until someone finally assembled a figure. So now, 2018, we have the peak of figuration. Guess what is probably going to happen next. Can you short the market for figuration?