The manifest prettiness of these paintings preempts just that appropriate judgment. Prettiness is not in their case a judgment to be levelled against them, but is instead a simple description of their content and modus vivendi . Their very emptiness, the lack of any content beyond a strategic self-concealment, is precisely what allows them to be so readily appropriated as the new appearance of the old, under the name abstraction. And yet what gives it the appearance of being an advanced artifact is that its contemporaneity comes to appearance only under the guise of an old, supposedly timeless, project called abstraction. What we hope here to accomplish by pointing to the obvious prettiness of new abstraction is to point contemporary culture away from the device of clothing itself in the garb not only of a popular past, but a past that had in turn clothed itself in the illusion of timelessness.
Pretty women are but one aspect of a larger picture.
Domestication is not the process by which something wild and new is transformed into something tame and old, but rather a process in which something is made familiar by making it appear as though it always already was tame and old. And should this first strategy fail there is then a second domesticating strategy. Appearing on the surface of the paintings themselves is a strategically profound prettiness. But the strategy of prettiness, as we've tried to show, lies not so much on the surface or even in the content, but rather institutes the prohibition of a content. Thus these paintings are themselves nothing more spectacular than the instantiation of the denial of their own content and possibility, though strategically framed under the contentful claim that they are abstract.