Although we might object to how these platforms impose their own viewing framework, it\u2019s also important to consider what, exactly, is being established by this way of looking at painting \u2014 to examine not so much the practices but the structures through which painting is defined and viewed. Should we even try to replicate the distinctive, even liminal1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - See Carol Duncan, \u201cThe Art Museum as Ritual,\u201d in Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums<\/em> (London and New York: Routledge, 1995): 11.<\/span>, effect of the gallery or museum in a space in which artworks are shown next to other types of images, often in vague or indistinguishable relationships? Art images were already widely available online, thanks in part to the extensive digitization of museum collections and continued developments in digital literacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even before the pandemic, the Web hosted countless image-sharing platforms for paint- ers, such as dedicated Instagram accounts (for instance, @contemporary.paintings, @cdnart- forecast, @contemporarypainting_canada, and @peinturecontemporaine_quebec) and exhibitions designed specifically for the Web or with an added virtual component (such as Galerie de l\u2019UQAM\u2019s Projet Peinture presented in 2013). These platforms employ different strategies, but they all have the same function. Although they offer a sequential view of artists\u2019 unique practices based on a curatorial premise (or at least a process of selection and dissemination), more than anything they present a panoramic or overall view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This panoramic exercise, at least in its digital form, allows us to discover the diversity and abundance of painting-based practices, which \u2014 especially since the advent of photography \u2014 have been declared dead on a fairly cyclical basis. In fact, it\u2019s become commonplace to announce the death of painting, finished off, in turn, by the next new art form, by artists, or by critics in their various attempts to write about it. Most thoughts on the death of painting, however, don\u2019t go too far beyond the polemical or rhetorical: their constant references to previous art discourse turn their own arguments into a kind of living-dead. Overviews of art practices offer a glimpse into the limitations of the post- painting utopia that abandoned the specificity of the image in favour of strictly conceptual, discursive, or theoretical reflection. What it now reveals is a discipline that, when concerned with these ideas, is defined first and foremost by a series of gestures, techniques, and processes used by all artists who work this way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although a panorama might confirm the strength of contemporary painting, it also reveals the exclusionary mechanisms of art within certain spaces. It demonstrates how the world of contemporary art has consistently snubbed any entity that wasn\u2019t interested in the same issues or that represented other communities, ways of being, or perspectives. Today, some institutions are making efforts to address systemic forms of exclusion, for example by finally making space for pictorial practices that were rebuffed or ignored for decades. Museums have made some headway in including racialized or Indigenous artists, sometimes notably (in the form of a retrospective exhibition), sometimes timidly (by acquiring one or two works for their collections). We are witnessing the process of painting\u2019s reactualization, which is just as important to consider as the currency of digitally disseminated practices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What also seems worth examining, beyond these art practices themselves or their presence in museums, is the perpetuation of certain discourses on painting. The digital realm, where the porosity between art spaces and other types of space is most keenly felt, makes evident what spills over from our closed circle, what spreads and gets noticed elsewhere. Paintings \u2014 whether contemporary or not \u2014 are at the centre of several viral phenomena that involve reappropriation and reuse by Internet users. Sometimes they are structured like a kind of conceptual art game \u2014 for instance, comparing the likeness of some well-known figure with the subject of a Renaissance or medieval painting \u2014 the kind of meme that tends to go viral. This brings to mind a piece by Fran\u00e7oise Sullivan from 1971 titled Portraits de personnes qui se ressemblent<\/em>,in which she juxtaposes a detail from a painting by Lorenzo Lotto with a photograph of her son. In this sense, paintings circulate in ways that mimic the modes of address used by artists in their work, again showing the porous relationship between art and non-art practices, or the borrowing of artistic strategies within a delivery mode that extends beyond the frame of art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But digital exchanges also reveal how many public attitudes toward painting persist. These attitudes are concerned less with image production than with its acceptance as a unique work, and that makes it an enduring cultural category. We see this in the kind of micro-controversies that thrive on social media. For example, on February 8, 2021, Kim Kardashian shared a photo on Instagram of a painting made by her daughter North West : a skilfully executed mountain landscape with a clear blue lake and islands of vegetation covered in purple, white, and yellow flowers. The caption read \u201cMy little artist North.\u201d As soon as the image was posted, Instagram users accused Kardashian of seeking attention by claiming that her daughter had painted a work that seemed well beyond the skill level of a seven-year-old child. A ridiculous media investigation ensued, eventually proving that the work was, in fact, made by North West. It was revealed that she had taken painting classes from an instructor whose first lesson was to paint a landscape just like the one Kardashian had posted. After hearing about the controversy, the instructor\u2019s daughter posted a video showing a nearly identical painting that she herself had made as a child, after learning the technique from her mother.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n What this brouhaha demonstrates is that although contemporary art has long laid these issues to rest, painting is still perceived as an object of romantic self-expression, a confirmation of unique talent and sacred virtuosity. What upsets people is the attribution of a supposedly very personal achievement to someone who had no hand in its making\u2014which brings to mind another conceptual strategy: artists who integrate objects made by others into their own work.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n <\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n It seems, then, that painting can be consid- ered both exceptional (deriving its value from its originality) and multiple (deriving its value from its ability to copy itself). Although we may want to understand it as the product of a unique effort by a single creator, we also see it reproduced by others, or as the basis of a series of reappropriated images, other movements, and pooled resources. Paradoxically, the two entities mentioned at the start of this essay, the Web and the commercial gallery, are key areas where the oscillation between exception and multiplicity should be considered, where the potential for painting\u2019s acquisition, remediation, and sharing becomes just as important as its institutional collection or presentation. In these environments, painting reasserts its basic transactional or contractual value, which is defined both by what one makes of it and by what it represents: a value whose determination goes beyond the circumscribed world of criticism or theory, and that nonetheless reasserts a kind of unexpected amplification of contemporary painting, if not to say another form of reactualization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Translated from the French by Jo-Anne Balcaen<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/DO1-IMG2-IM_Fiset_MACM_01_RGB-1024x683.jpg\")
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Photo : Guy L\u2019Heureux, courtesy of Mus\u00e9e d\u2019art contemporain de Montr\u00e9al
(bottom) RELATIONS: la diaspora et la peinture, <\/em>exhibition view, Fondation Phi pour l\u2019art contemporain, Montr\u00e9al, 2020.
Photo : Richard-Max Tremblay, courtesy of Fondation Phi pour l\u2019art contemporain, Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n