When we look past the term abstraction and toward the surfaces themselves we judge this work simply pretty, indeed overwhelmingly pretty. Our contention is that contemporary so-called abstract art is not publicly judged pretty because such a public declaration would disallow any further reception of the work under the name abstraction. Prettiness is the technology of that effacement, indeed prettiness might even be that which elicits its own effacement. We do not mean prettiness as a kind of lesser beauty. Prettiness is of course a judgment, indeed an aesthetic judgment levelled against something or someone.
Prettiness courts dismissal, and in a very specific way.
Perhaps we should take a cue from social life, where it seems the judgment is more often than not directed against women, though delivered in the guise of a tribute. To judge a woman pretty would then be an ideological move. Our contention is not that women really are threatening and that judging them pretty is a way of disarming that threat. We believe instead that the judgment of prettiness serves at once to both constitute women as threat and simultaneously to insist all the more vehemently on the necessity of disarming the threat. New abstract painting is a somewhat different, but related kettle of fish.