EXTREME PAINTING: EYEBALLING

(In the middle of the twentieth century, Formalist critics, led by Clement Greenberg, championed flatness as painting's defining quality-the quality that distinguished painting as an art from other arts-from music, sculpture, dance, and architecture.) And a painting doesn't necessarily feature imagery-such as a nude, a landscape, a battle scene, or a bowl of fruit- recognizable in the world. [...]vision means envisioning. Down through the millennia and across the globe-including ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman art, Asian, and Australian aboriginal art-the art of painting has captivated viewers with arrangements of colored shapes, made by human hands and minds, all done with an aim to explore what can be seen, in reality and in imagination, and how things look transformed through the process of painting. [...]vision means what we do in the process of engaging with the painting. Strolling national pavilions, the mammoth gallery space of the Arsanale, and the many separate art staging sites around the canal-lined city (in palaces, alleys, and island piazzas), viewers (including veteran art watchers) stand a good chance of being mesmerized or befuddled, sometimes both at once, by artworks in a vast variety of media, scales, styles, aesthetic persuasions, and emotional registers. Most of the art on exhibition at the 2013 Venice Biennale-and the same could be said for other contemporary art extravaganzas and huge museum shows we've attended in Berlin, Kasel, London, Paris, Shanghai, Santa Fe, Havana, Prague, Bonn, Bern, Cologne, Madrid, Chicago, and New York City-carries a big stick and speaks loudly. [...]why should...