Abstraction's moment.

Abstract art has been around for about a hundred years, long enough, you would think, for it to have ceased to be an issue. Yet despite its century-old tradition, abstraction still causes consternation. Unsophisticated audiences continue to be disconcerted by the way that abstract paintings and sculptures look like nothing but themselves. What's more surprising, some of the hippest gallery-and museum-goers are often just as disconcerted, albeit for different reasons. Abstraction's resistance to explication disturbs many sophisticated viewers, given the present-day art world's cherished conviction that works of art must be fully bolstered by statements of intent and elaborate iterations of generating concepts, if they are to be taken seriously. Works that at first viewing apparently refuse to be about anything but themselves and their own history are dismissed as empty, corporate, "merely" decorative, or, in some circles, patriarchal and imperialist, no matter how multivalent the associations they provoke. (Abstract artists who claim deep spiritual, theoretical, or philosophical bases for their work are usually exempt from these charges.) Adding to abstract art's ability to discomfit is the lingering resentment provoked by the name "Clement Greenberg," the most articulate and perceptive champion of American post-war abstraction.

The more recent the abstract art, the more problematic it seems to be. No one doubts the importance of Vassily Kandinsky or Piet Mondrian. Russian Constructivism ranks high, although that may be for political reasons. Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko are admired, probably as much for their own insistence that they were deep thinkers whose art embodied Big Ideas, as for the potency of the work itself. Jackson Pollock and Hans Hofmann seem to have transcended Greenberg's enthusiasm for them. But come closer to our own day and anything relating to abstraction becomes more contentious--except when you're dealing with Minimalism, which seems to have a special dispensation from the usual criticisms leveled against abstract art.

Curators, critics, and artists wrangle about the continuing significance of abstraction, while exhibitions proliferate celebrating contemporary manifestations of the most overrated of High Academic art's achievements--excruciating fidelity to appearances and meticulous finish--usually used as ends in themselves. Yet, as I write this, a magnificent survey of Sean Scully's severe, opulent geometric paintings and works on paper is splendidly installed at the Metropolitan Museum, a retrospective of Morris Louis's ethereal, elusive paintings has just opened at the High Museum of Atlanta, and a large, comprehensive overview of Brice Marden's work is at the Museum of Modern Art. (It's possible that Marden's Minimalist roots count heavily in his favor, but that doesn't entirely explain the critical enthusiasm for his recent "cool Baroque" work.) In addition, highly respected galleries in Chelsea, Fifty-seventh Street, and the Upper East Side are showing Pat Lipsky's cool, geometric abstract canvases; Willard Boepple's eloquent, self-contained abstract sculptures; Helen Frankenthaler's improvisational abstract constructions in steel; and Frank Stella's raucous, exuberant abstract collages and reliefs. Not long ago, a spectacular new Chelsea space was inaugurated by an exhibition of Joseph Marioni's austere, seductive, monochrome abstract paintings. Kirk Varnedoe's 2003 Mellon Lectures, "Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock," have just been published by Princeton University Press. And full disclosure: I'm working on a major traveling exhibition of abstract art, "Color as Field: American Painting 1950-1975," for the American Federation of Arts. Is there new interest in art that looks like nothing but itself?

When I was a rookie curator, in the 1970S, figurative artists felt themselves to be embattled--or, at least, "traditional" figurative artists did, given the ascendancy of Pop Art, with its easily recognizable mass culture imagery. The acclaim and attention awarded Minimal art and color-based abstraction thirty years ago made artists engaged by perception believe that art that looked like something required defending against the dominance of abstract art--a curious position, since earlier abstract artists had felt their convictions needed vigilant defense. In today's world of alternative media, catch-all installation art, and virtual reality, painting itself, along with the notion of sculpture-as-object, whether abstract or not, often requires vigorous support.

For Greenberg and his fellow formalist critics, abstraction was an inevitable step in the course of modernism, which, Greenberg famously posited (based on his voracious observations), was a process of each discipline gradually eliminating anything not intrinsic to it. For painting, the expendable included narrative and illusionism. Today's aspiring artists see nothing inevitable about the advent of abstraction. For them, it appears to be just one of many available languages, regarded rather as Latin might be as an unpopular high school elective.

The real issues may not be the differences between abstraction and figuration, even allowing for the enduring currency of the ancient assumption that visual art is mimesis. Naive as the idea seems, it's a recurring thread in the history of art. Pliny recounts a competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, the leading painters of fifth century B.C. Greece. Birds pecked at Zeuxis's painted bunch of grapes, convincing him he was the winner, but when he asked to have the curtain covering Parrhasius's picture removed and discovered that the curtain was the painting, he conceded the prize; Zeuxis had deceived nature but Parrhasius deceived the trained eye of a fellow artist. And in our own era, everyone's heard about museum visitors asking directions of an unresponsive Duane Hansen guard.

But all art, no matter how momentarily convincing or deceptive its illusionism, is an abstraction. Picasso's famous phrase "Art is not the truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth" can be read literally, as well as metaphorically. How artists exercise their ability to organize forms, shapes, colors, lines, and textures, in formal terms--the raw materials of all works of art--is far more important to the success or failure of the resulting work than their adroitness in inventing imagery or imitating appearances. What separates Vermeer from his contemporaries, who also painted tidy Dutch interiors populated by placid women, is not greater technical facility--ter Borch, in fact, was unrivalled as a painter of silk--but rather the matchless sense of order, lucid structure, and eloquent interval that distinguishes all of Vermeer's paintings, made subtle and harmonious by his ability to orchestrate light. The extraordinary abstract, formal qualifies of Vermeer's paintings, as embodiments of emotion and intellect, set him apart and ensure his place in the pantheon of seventeenth-century giants, not their subject matter or presumed fidelity to perception.

Meyer Schapiro, writing about the unimportance of the subject, pointed out that Giorgione's "The Tempest" is no less wonderful because its theme has never been identified nor would it become any more astonishing as a painting if the elusive subject were discovered. "If subject matter is the main thing" the abstract painter Larry Poons likes to ask students, "then why aren't all crucifixions equally good?" Narrative motifs and recognizable images are obviously absent in abstract art, but the same standards apply. It's the extraordinary formal qualities of the best abstractions, as embodiments of emotion and intellect, that make them worth paying attention to.

These days, larger, more deeply ingrained oppositions separate artists than the simple difference between abstraction and figuration. The most important and divisive distinction is between concept-based art and what is often termed "process-based" art--art that exults in its own evolution, its own physicality and materiality. Artists whose work is concept-based, a group that includes just about everyone to have come out of a graduate art department in the past decade or so, are usually contemptuous of process-based art. Concept-based art, they will tell you, is superior to process-based art because it demands that artists have the entire idea in their minds before they start to make their work. It's a remarkably old argument. I keep thinking about the "official" painters of Baroque Rome who dismissed the work of the truculent young upstart from the North, Caravaggio, saying that all he was doing was copying nature. His high-minded colleagues would have admired the young Lombard more if he had based his paintings on an idealized, "corrected" version of nature visibly informed by an understanding of geometry and a thorough study of the masterworks of the past; Caravaggio's work evidently suffered from a lack of concept.

Sometimes concept-based and process-based art resemble each other. You may think that something looks like a geometric abstraction that investigates the expressive power of color relationships, but it turns out to be, say, a demonstration of codified amounts of certain colors found in some pre-existing (usually non-art, mass-culture) object. At best, concept-based art, like the best process-based art, or the best of any kind of art, can be both intellectually engaging and visually compelling. At worst, concept-based art can be little more than the illustration of an idea, with all evidence of chance, hesitation, or doubt, and any response to things that happened as the work evolved, systematically eliminated.

When I'm confronted by this sort of thing on studio visits or at art schools, when I'm invited as a guest critic, I find that young artists are not only ready to provide intellectual justification for what they are doing, but also astonishingly good at articulating their impressive-sounding concerns. That these concerns, alas, are not always borne out by the works of art themselves is often a problem; the source idea, in fact, can be more engaging than the work it generates, so much so that I often wonder why young artists remain so doggedly attached to their preconceived ideas and the constraints they inflict.

You can blame Marcel Duchamp, of course, who wished "to carry the mind of the spectator toward other regions more verbal." Yet it sometimes seems as if contemporary young artists relied on preconception as much out of fear as conviction--out of a lack of trust in their own abilities, in their power of invention, in their intuition. The phenomenon may be the depressing flip side of Arthur Danto's notion that we are at the end of art history as we know it.

Artists working today may be liberated from the implicit pressure of responding to the promptings of current desiderata and feel free to invent themselves by picking and choosing from the entire spectrum of the available past, but they seem unable to invent without the crutch of concepts that can be articulated verbally. That the resulting text-driven work often remains opaque until those concepts are stated (and sometimes remains opaque even then) is, I suppose, to be expected, and since most young practitioners don't trust their materials to be expressive, relying instead on high finish and meticulousness, I suppose it's also to be expected that their work depends on recognizable imagery and narrative, arcane or otherwise, as well as--frequently--on evidence of labor and time expended on execution to signal serious engagement. (This accounts, in part, for the respect accorded James Siena's obsessively repetitious abstract images, which occupy a fascinating territory bordered by Zen meditation, superhuman control, and doodling.)

It may be that this renewed emphasis on craft, once seen as the exclusive province of the Academies, in both abstract and figurative art, is simply a way of capturing and slowing the attention of audiences habituated to speedy viewing and fast-cuts. It may also have something to do with the dominance of media-based art, with its completely anonymous surfaces and, often, photographic imagery. These qualities--"high production values," as young artists refer to them--demand that all evidence of human intervention be erased, in order that the finished work, whether abstract or not, resembles, as much as is feasible, a commercially produced, mechanically engendered object; this is also sometimes known as "contemporary finish."

Among the fundamental concepts of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting was the belief that the source of art was the unconscious and that an artist working wholeheartedly out of intuition would somehow charge the materials he (or she) adopted with his own being, so that they would wordlessly embody his deepest feelings and concerns. For the Abstract Expressionists, the artist's characteristic marks, habits of gesture and composition, color preferences, and all the rest of it were unmistakable declarations of individuality. Abstract Expressionism's brand of "painterly painting" as the great Swiss art historian Heinrich Wolfflin termed pictures based on loose, brushy, tonally inflected gestures, was both a formal choice and a declaration of faith in the ability of painting materials to become carriers of emotion and personality. The very way materials were manipulated, along with all the other traces of the work's development, including the indications of past states and hints of possible future states--all the visible evidence of choices, of things rejected or embraced--were assumed to indicate the presence of a unique (probably anxiety-ridden, hypersensitive) person.

Minimalism's declared desire was to eliminate such messy, embarrassing evidence of human fallibility. The Minimalists hoped to achieve the uninflected appearance of machine-made, industrial objects, as a reinforcement of the extreme neutrality of their forms--a singularity that eliminated, as much as possible, the internal relationships of the work of art. This neutrality led Minimalist art to be referred to as "literal"--a term of opprobrium for Minimalism's critics, most notably Michael Fried, who found "literalist art" inert and completely dependent on its relation to the viewer and the space in which it was located, a fatal flaw Fried termed "theatricality." In many ways, while celebrating the eloquence of internal relationships, the Color Field painters aspired to a similar neutrality or, rather, transparency of touch: Frankenthaler's Pollock-inspired stains, Noland's pristine stripes and bars, Louis's weightless layers and cascades, Olitski's gravity-defying radiant sprays and chatoyant swipes, or Poons's disembodied throws, in which gravity becomes an agent of drawing. Anthony Caro's polychrome steel constructions of industrial members, which seem to hover above the ground rather than rest upon it, are informed by the same spirit.

Yet no matter how invisible--or even absent-the hand, Color Field painting is always about the material properties of paint--its ability to flow, its sensuality, and the radiance of its color--just as no matter how weightless they appear, Caro's sculptures are always about the physical characteristics of steel--its tensile strength and its ability to be both thin and self-sustaining, allowing it to delineate space without displacing it. This materiality is usually subsumed, in both Color Field painting and Caro's sculpture, by their abstractness and by what has been called their "opticality"--their way of addressing the eye without the overt reminders of process, the layering and gestures of Abstract Expressionism. Even so, human agency is always implicit in the unexpectedness and the subtleties of color, structure, and proportion.

It's worth noting that Minimalism's paradigmatic sculptures--Donald Judd's boxes--while aiming at the appearance of machine-made neutrality, often end up looking quirky and hand-made, and are sometimes assembled out of kitschy combinations of materials. The result, interestingly enough, is not to emphasize the physicality and presentness of the boxes but rather to make them look badly improvised, like models of themselves. Far from suggesting that the physical manifestations of the boxes are part of their meaning, the haphazard combinations of, for example, plastic and metal make the structures seem expedient and unconsidered. That is to say, you are aware of the materiality of the boxes, at the same time that you are aware of how inexpressive that materiality is.

I spoke earlier of abstract art's apparent refusal to be about anything but itself and its own history, at least at first viewing, no matter how multivalent its associations or how potent its ability to move or disturb--when we engage with it over time--no matter, in other words, how ambiguous it really is. Some of the most compelling recent abstract artists seem to court ambiguity in their work, deploying images that simultaneously defy easy identification and seem loaded with allusions. These allusions can elude precise interpretation or refuse to adhere to a single scale; they certainly resist precise verbal explication. But they nevertheless make their presence felt, enriching and enlivening the work. I'm thinking of the mysterious paintings of Thomas Nozkowski and Bill Jensen, with their delicate surfaces, surprising shapes and colors, and their haunting sense of being about something you can't quite recognize.

I'm thinking, too, of Anthony Caro's recent large-scale sculptures, which are both completely self-sufficient geometric structures and powerful evocations of sacred precincts, ancient sites, and the detritus of modern cities. Frances Barth's eerie, beautiful paintings are at once declaratively abstract and about the way you perceive space; they simultaneously suggest mapping, distant and intimate views, perspectival rendering, and confrontational flatness. Karlis Rekevics's plaster constructions distill and reconstitute perceptions of the urban environment; they transform your associations by transforming scale, orientation, and internal relationships, and make further demands on your responsive powers by making light an integral "structural" component. And there are many more present-day practitioners mining similar veins with equally impressive results--results that similarly suggest new possibilities for abstraction, reassuringly devoid of post-modernism's now habitual irony and cynicism.

Unfortunately, the minds of many spectators, who include makers of art as well as art historians, critics, and curators, have been carried so far into regions so purely literary (in deference to Duchamp) that they seem to have forgotten that the eye is part of the brain. Like Duchamp, they are made uneasy by "aesthetic delectation," assuming that art that wordlessly addresses the eye, that looks like nothing but itself, is mindless--which is to say, they are profoundly mistrustful of abstraction. Perhaps the recent constellation of exhibitions that I listed earlier in this essay--exhibitions all posited on the conviction that the eye, the intellect, and the emotions are inextricably connected--is an indication that art is retreating from "regions more verbal" back to the realm of the visual. "Aesthetic delectation"--abstract, figurative, or anywhere in between--is not a bad thing.