Comment | We are living in an age of bad painting-the medium must be challenged to stay interesting

"It is dangerous to use art fairs as a barometer of making and meaning in contemporary art. But walking through Frieze London's carpeted aisles in October, a long-developed hunch was confirmed emphatically: we are amid a deluge of bad painting. It is not good "bad painting", in the late Francis Picabia sense. It is bad bad painting. Bloated, vapid, performative (not in the good sense) painting. Stultifyingly boring painting. Market-slump painting. "Oh-why-not?" painting."

"The exhibition Painting After Painting: a Contemporary Survey from Belgium at the SMAK museum in Ghent between April and November was less disquieting. (Full disclosure: I led a panel at SMAK on the subject of painting with two curators of recent surveys, Lydia Yee and Manuela Ammer.) But while the intellectual framework around the show was robust and thoughtful and the presentation absorbing, with plenty of examples of engaging work, a lot of it still felt thin in subject or wanting in execution."

"I wonder: has painting become too comfortable? No one says painting is dead anymore. It never will be, of course. But with no ideological objections it isn't forced to defend itself, to come out fighting. Some of the best painting of the past century was made in times of crisis and reckoning, when artists using paint felt embattled or disenfranchised from the central discourse."

Art fairs reveal a proliferation of poor-quality painting characterized by bloated, vapid, performative, and market-driven tendencies that often feel stultifyingly boring. Museum surveys can present more thoughtful frameworks and contain engaging work, yet many paintings still appear thin in subject or wanting in execution. Survey breadth can dilute standards when covering many artists within a single medium. Painting may have grown complacent without ideological pressures to defend itself, reducing urgency and critical vigor. Historically, notable painting often emerged from crisis when practitioners felt embattled or excluded from central discourse, producing stronger, more consequential work.

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