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As a former writer for the New Art Examiner I was excited to read Derek Guthrie’s Oct. 11 interview. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is planning a seminar around the recent publication of The Essential New Art Examiner, and Derek's unwavering challenge to the set the historical record about the NAE straight is long overdue. To fill in a bit on recent history - when the NEA came to its sorry demise in 2002 it had not only been financially mishandled but dispossessed of it’s true critical verve and diversity of purpose. Under the editorship Kathryn Hixson it had fallen on both monetary mismanagement and a program of ideological relativism in its choice of what to review and how to write about it. It no longer represented a plurality of critical voices and art exhibits but sought to imitate standard postmodern strategies and jargon – the pabulum that other fat rich commercial art glossies had been publishing for decades. Kathryn and the board had broken both the NAE’s finances and spirit, jettisoning what had made the it the most unique forum for art world debate on a national scale. It nurtured the fledgling voices of beginning art writers who would never have had a chance to publish otherwise. Even back in 1989 when I worked for an art library in New York the NAE was always the art first periodical picked off the shelf and always the first to get ear worn with use, more so than Art in America and Artforum. Everybody knew the NAE was an important alternative, even in the powerful art center of New York City. This is why I cannot overstress the importance of having meaningful discussion on the NAE's actual history regarding its founders Derek Guthrie and the late Jane Addams Allen for the upcoming SAIC seminar. First it is a real shame, exposing a kind of censorship in fact, that SAIC did not invite to sponsor the attendance of the remaining original founder Derek Guthrie to come and speak. Second it is imperative that the late Jane Addams Allen be memorialized at this event for her tremendous effort and foresight in establishing the NAE as such an outstanding exception among art periodicals. The NAE was Jane’s continuation of the progressive humanist tradition begun by her great Aunt Jane Addams by establishing it as a periodical for diverse opinions and voices against the power of censorship. Its original masthead read “The Independent Voice of the Visual Arts.” It did not escape my notice that this was later changed to the innocuously banal "Voice of the Midwest" under Kathryn Hixson’s unfortunate editorship. I cannot agree more with Guthrie when he states that we live in a culture where independent spirit, meaningful discussion, and genuine intellectual debate have been trumped by tribal politics and institutional control. Such powers often disguise themselves in a cloak of seeming diversity, when they are quite the opposite - the wolf of censorship hiding in the sheepskin of tolerance and pluralism. In 1973 when NAE was founded it was a time of social and political upheaval which we are experiencing again, right now, all over the world. Movements of protest are rejecting social, political, and economic standards that have turned out to be a lies. Masses of people are railing against manipulative propagandas disseminated by power élites. The NAE was born in such circumstances and the time has come again to seriously question who gets to have control. In this upcoming seminar will the SAIC prove to be a handmaiden to political intrigues and ideological revisionism as a way of "honoring" the uncensored and intellectual diversity and of The Essential New Art Examiner? Don’t forget it was the NAE who had a big hand in putting Chicago on the national, even international, art map in the first place. By not sponsoring Derek Guthrie to speak will its students and attendees be subject to censorship - fed a limited menu of issues for debate, controlling what can and cannot be discussed? Will the seminar point to the weakness of this fear - that those who have power cannot allow the presence of challenge or meaningful dialectical discussion? Or will they take up the gauntlet and invite him to inject some critical vitality into our over sanitized art discourse? We shall see….. Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, IL. She is a 2002 recipiant of a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant and recently exhibited at the Kouros Gallery in New York City in 2010. She is represented by the Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, the Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago.

Matthew Woodward was born in Rochester, NY in 1981. He graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005 with a BFA and from there went on to earn his Masters in Drawing from the New York Academy of Art in 2007. Currently he lives in Chicago and is represented by Linda Warren Gallery. Following a review and interview with Bad at Sports in early 2011, Woodward had three solo shows, all in Chicago. They were at Linda Warren Gallery, The Union League Club and at the Elmhurst Art Museum, which is up currently and has been reviewed in Art Critical. He is also currently in a group show, Ways of Making: Work on Paper, at Governors State University. Recently, Woodward was artist in residence at the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program, through MICA, in Lehon, France. He is currently scheduled to exhibit a new body of drawings funded by a CAAP award at the Chicago Cultural Center in May 2012. Neoteric Art: You are currently part of a group show "Ways of Making: Work on Paper" with Michelle Grabner, Zach Mory and Alison Svoboda — curated by Elizabeth Whiting and Jeff Stevenson. How did you become acquainted with Elizabeth Whiting? Matthew Woodward: I got involved with Elizabeth Whiting when I attended Katie Loomis' show last year at the Union League Club where Elizabeth is the Curator. I sort of waited around all night while she talked to everyone, I wanted to introduce myself and ask if I could submit a proposal. The Union League Club has had, for years, this beautiful and intimate gallery space on their third floor for emerging artists. At the time it wasn't open to submissions. You had to be asked, and so I asked for myself. And for a few months I tastefully hounded her until she agreed to allow me to submit some work. I ended up having a show called Or To Append the Canceled Lyrics about a year later. Elizabeth is about as magnanimous a person to work with as you can get, and I've been really fortunate to have her in my corner. She passes on to me about every opportunity she finds. And so when her and Jeff Stevenson began working on this project, she came to me and asked if I'd be interested. I was. Anyway, Ways of Making is actually a series of shows about a variety of disciplines in which the work selected is in some way still very much in touch with the actual process that developed it. It actually becomes quite an interactive frame through which to approach a show. And I think with an exhibit that focuses in particular on paper you're going to find that raw, hands-on, manipulable transaction readily available. And Elizabeth and Jeff did fine work curating this show. There is an obsessiveness to the handling of surface here that almost overrides the actual finished product. It's seductive and you can see it happening all over the paper, like a memory has been turned inside out. With Michelle's work you want to walk into it and walk back and then walk up again and touch all over it. That thin beamstring texture of silverpoint light can be puzzling. I wanted to run my fingers over her drawings like a piano, to be perfectly honest. The mark making is painfully deliberate, and as such it becomes a pivot point that's undeniable to the concept of the work as a whole. If you look a Zach's work, it's the same. It's awe-inspiring, and technically overwhelming and simple and manic and when you hear him talk about it it also becomes something else in a way that pulls the intensity of all this mark-making, which he wouldn't be able to help doing anyway, into the scope of his intent. He marries the two almost seamlessly. And with Alison's work, too. There is no where to get bored, or even to start looking at this massive motheyed fractal map she installed. It looks like its going to flake off the wall like a huge mushroom cap. She has manipulated the paper in a way that mutes it's connection with a specific materiality, it looks fragile and filmy and wet still and attempts a very corporeal interaction with the work. www.mdwoodward.com www.govst.edu/gallery/

MDW Fair which had its debut earlier this April ran again this past weekend with the intent of being a bi-yearly event. This time around the Fair—once again on three floors of the GeoLofts building on Chicago's South side—offered the same high energy and most of the quality venues that were present the first time out. There were also some exciting new exhibitors. The first floor had the Hand in Glove Conference. As their website states: a new semiannual conference for independent visual arts facilitators working at the crossroads of creative administration and studio practice. This conference was open to people engaged in the pragmatic realities and imaginative possibilities of organizing exhibitions, re-granting programs, publications, residencies, public programs, platforms for projects, and a variety of other programming that challenges traditional formats for the production and reception of art at the grass-roots level. The second and third floors held the small not-for-profits, artist-run spaces, independent galleries, collectives, curators and publishers from around the country. Strong showings included Erik DeBat at 2612 Space, Paul Nudd at Western Exhibitions, Brian Kapernekas at 65Grand, Tom Torluemke at Linda Warren, Kristina Paabus and Raul Mendez at Hinge Gallery and bookmaking at North Branch Projects. Let's hope that MDW Fair will continue and become a driving force in the Chicago art scene.

Matthew Ballou is an artist and writer living in Columbia, Missouri with his wife and daughter. He earned his BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA from Indiana University. He is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Painting and Drawing in the Art Department of The University of Missouri, where he has taught since 2007. Neoteric Art: Regarding your new book, "Nine Texts", what was your favorite subject or topic to write about? Matthew Ballou: I always love writing about the processes of thinking about art and the methods of actually creating it. These two avenues come together in terms of experience itself, and that’s perhaps the most deeply rooted interest that I have. I think these things – process, method, and experience – unite most of the writing I’ve done over the years. That’s why, for example, my short piece Thoughts on Loving Diebenkorn’s Work is closely tied to other essays like Art and Submission or On Intuition and Analysis. Though these two longer pieces seem to be more abstract and deal with art in slightly more lofty language, they’re really very much about the background that brings me to my appreciation of Diebenkorn or any other artist. I find myself able to look into other artists’ work – and my own – with much more rigor and determination after writing texts such as those. Writing like this is able to, as I describe in On Intuition and Analysis, help me integrate my analytical consideration with my intuitive experience (and vice versa). Constantly working on that balance feels appropriate. Another subject that flows naturally from dealing with thought processes, working method, and reflecting upon experience is that of teaching. In some sense all of my writing is about how I’ve been taught, how I’ve learned to challenge myself, and how I’ve grown in my ability to bring this life of art to students. A piece of writing such as Subjectivity and Robert Henri was something that helped set the stage of what I’d learned so that I could try to express it to others. My writing has always been an interpretive tool for me first – I often work on essays for years before I feel I’ve got a handle on what they’re aiming to do. The writing helps me teach myself. I’ve appreciated the way Neoteric has allowed me the flexibility to present my thoughts both formally and informally. One piece can be more off the cuff and reactive, while others can carry the reflective distance of years. I think seeing that range in my own process has illuminated the process/method/experience core that I’m most interested in as a writer. BOOK BLURB NINE TEXTS collects the writings Matthew Ballou crafted for Neoteric Art as a contributing essayist between 2009 and 2011. Touching on a wide variety of topics, from the work of Richard Diebenkorn and Andrew Wyeth to the challenging questions surrounding intuition and analysis, Ballou’s writings are centered in his own practice as an artist and educator. Highlights from this collection include Subjectivity and Robert Henri, Art and Submission, and Teaching Close Encounters. Buy the book here. See Matthew Ballou's work at www.eikonktizo.com.

I'm sending you my dirty laundry writes Courbet to his parents in 1839. Courbet is only twenty years old, a student at Besançon, and looks like the self-assured young man in this self-portrait (not the larger-than-life painter who once bragged that he drank two bottles of Burgundy, three bottles of Bordeaux, one bottle of local wine, coffee laced with Cognac, followed by dessert, and then threw it all up Roman-style while staying at a friend's estate in Saintonge). After giving his parents the heads up about the laundry Courbet says that one, he would like his parents to send him more cotton stockings (he doesn't wear the woolen ones) and that two, he has blood in his stool, but contrary to the hemorrhoid diagnosis of his doctor, he believes he is simply suffering from a case of échauffement, or constipation. One of the reasons I like to read letters of the famous is for details just like these. Wow. Courbet had trouble pinching off a loaf now and then. Just like me. It isn't only to find out that the famous are just like us (US magazine's attempt to assure us that stars' lives are not that different from ours) that I read letters. Reading the daily bric-a-brac of people's lives, where Manet bought his shoes before his duel with Duranty, who met Courbet for dinner at the Café Andler; these small curios of information plunge me into their world in a way that a biography cannot do: I feel as if I know them when I finish reading their letters. When Manet complains in a letter to Zachary Astruc that he hasn't heard from Baudelaire lately, Baudelaire sounds less like the unattainable poet-god on the pedestal where I keep him and more like a guy I might run into in a diner. (I recently found Charles Baudelaire on Facebook and asked him to be my friend; he hasn't confirmed yet.) And what about the delicious innocence of Manet's question to his friend Théodore Duret: "Who is this Monet whose name sounds like mine and who is taking advantage of my notoriety?" Another reason to read letters? You become your own historian. Letters, along with church records, public records, maps, and treatises (to name just a few) constitute the flotsam of primary sources that historians pick up from puddles, lakes, and oceans of conserved, sometimes intentionally (sometimes not) debris. With them a version of a story is patched together to enlighten (or, when used as propaganda, to persuade) an audience. Delving into letters means that you can create your story. A good example of the slippery nature of building a story occurred when I recently read Manet's letters. I've read several books about Manet and the one I like for sheer readability is Beth Archer Brombert's Rebel in a Frock Coat. Brombert constructs a tight, solid narrative of Manet's life and work: saucy stories of the Belle Epoque, penetrating, but not overly academic, analysis of his paintings, investigative ferreting into Manet's family life, and, like a good tour leader with a bright orange stick waving in the air, Brombert deftly guides us through the labyrinth of 19th century politics; the Empires, Republics, Monarchies, and insurrections. According to Brombert, Manet endured a loveless marriage with a Dutch woman named Suzanne Leenhoff. Manet, only twenty, got her pregnant while she was working as his music instructor and later married her out of honor (claiming, to save face, that his illegitimate son Léon was in fact Suzanne's brother). Suzanne was beneath the Manets socially, rather homely, and fairly simple by all accounts. Berthe Morisot nicknamed her "la grosse Suzanne" - "fat Susan". Brombert points out that Manet stayed married and led the kind of life the haute bougeoisie demanded of him; in the book there is no reference to love or tenderness between the two. Enter primary sources! While reading Manet's letters during the Franco-Prussian war (Manet stayed in the capital as a volunteer and sent his family south for safety) one can't help but notice that Manet wrote to Suzanne practically everyday and not just to say "Wassup, fat Susan"? Here are a few samples that were delivered by hot air balloons and pigeons from the besieged capital: October 23, 1870: I spent a long time, my dear Suzanne, looking for your photograph - I eventually found the album in the table in the drawing room, so I can look at your comforting face from time to time. I woke up last night thinking I heard you calling me... November 23, 1870: Goodbye my dear Suzanne, I embrace you lovingly and would give Alsace and Lorraine to be with you. December 23, 1870: Goodbye my dear Suzanne, your portraits are hanging in every corner of the bedroom, so I see you first and last thing... And so on and so on. Brombert does mention the letters. She says that earlier biographies (citing one from 1947 by Adolphe Tabarant) used the letters to intimate "a vague picture of domestic bliss" and that "no attention has been paid to the probable dissatisfactions of both spouses." Brombert read all the letters, but combined with other documentation and research, put together a new version of the Manet/Suzanne relationship, one based on her own reading of primary sources (a reading which is in all probability closer to reality than Tabarant's "vague picture of domestic bliss"). Reading other people's letters is not for everyone. I'm still reading Courbet's (632 pages and causing me a bit of tendonitis in my right arm from holding it upright in bed). My husband winces when he sees me reading them; he is appalled by my lack of discretion. He's right in a way: pinching a letter from a postman's cart is a criminal offense and reading someone else's mail (such as when a friend of mine and I steamed upon an envelope addressed to her mother from her estranged father and then resealed it) is dishonest, disrespectful, and downright wrong. Yet, when someone famous dies letters become a free-for-all: the desk drawers are opened, spilled out, and we get to rummage through. Luc Sante, writing about the recent publication of Susan Sontag's journals (Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963) says that "the complicated, somewhat voyeuristic thrill the reader might derive from seemingly prying open the author's desk drawer is [...] to a certain extent, a fiction in which both parties are complicit". Ah, another post-modern dilemma, and it may be true for modern writers: French philosopher and theorist Michel Foucault famously burned and destroyed every shred of personal writing before he died. Sante's statement implies that in the end we only read what the foresighted author wanted us to read. Will all published letters begin then to fall into the self-aware, post-modern complicity that Sante writes about? As for me, give me the age of innocence and the "voyeuristic thrill" I have when I read about bloody stool, passion (or lack of it), and dirty laundry. In a letter dated August 23, 1865, Manet writes to his friend Zacharie Astruc: "I should be going with Champfleury and Stevens, but they keep putting it off. Anyway, they are bloody bores. Excuse the unseeming language, but since my letter is not for publication, I can say what I please." Touché. Resources: Manet by himself, edited by Juliette Bareau-Wilson Letters of Gustave Courbet, edited by Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau : "The discourse designed to make the other speak remains the speaker's discourse and the mirror of his undertaking." - "Le discours destiné à dire l'autre reste son discours et le miroir de son opération."

Derek Guthrie is a British artist, art critic, and co-founder of the influential art magazine New Art Examiner. In October 1973, Guthrie and his late wife, Jane Addams Allen, founded the New Art Examiner in Chicago. Known for decades in Chicago for his work in art criticism, Guthrie is credited with having helped introduce a new set of writers that would become prominent in their field. The magazine ceased operations in 2002. In November of 2011 with the help of editors: Kathryn Born, Terri Griffith and Janet Koplos, a book titled The Essential New Art Examiner containing past essays and articles will be published. Neoteric Art: Tell us more on the soon to be released book "The Essential New Art Examiner" and also some history on the magazine. Derek Guthrie: After an absence for many years I returned to Chicago and gave a lecture at the Cultural Center on the New Art Examiner covering its birth which was a resistance to the then Chicago art elite that was determined that we should not publish. Art News was pressured to lift an article written by Jane Adams Allen and myself from the printing press a few days before publication. The life of the NAE was turbulent and difficult as we were shunned by the MCA and also branded as ignorant art writers. I also in the lecture commented on the death of the NAE brought on by the incompetence of the last editor the late Kathryn Hixson and a lack luster board that was even bolstered by a massive grant from Lou Manilow. The magazine by then had already achieved a national status. My comments and other stories caught the imagination of Kathryn Born of Chicago Art Magazine who with the help of Terri Griffith and Janet Koplos and past editors chose articles to be republished therefore making an anthology: "The Essential New Art Examiner". I contributed an introductory essay along with Kathryn Born and Janet Koplos. I am delighted not to have any part in the choosing of content as it proves the NAE was ahead of its time as many issues we introduced have meaning for a later generation. However the hostility that the New Art Examiner provoked continues. I hoped and expected with this event of recognition in the form of a book would lay to rest the idea that we were political incorrect. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is having a reception and one day seminar on Art Criticism organized by the head of Art Journalism Jim Yood a previous Chicago editor of the NAE. After consideration SAIC decided that they would not support my travel expenses to attend. This has caused some frustration as I was looking forward to the occasion to make known that the New Art Examiner was in part determined by the values Jane Addams put into place by her niece, my late wife and co-founder of the NAE, Jane Addams Allen. I have some hope that another University in the Midwest will give me in the new year the opportunity to make clear these unknown facts that Jane Addams Allen was afraid to acknowledge her heritage publicly as she feared a backlash accusing her of grandstanding on her family name. She was correct as the NAE received a letter to the editor from a well known public personality that was printed as all letters to the editor were saying that she was not fit to carry the family name. I have the belief that culture is suffering in the US as the Independent spirit that used to be present in Intellectual life is disappearing. Tribal politics dominate. The individual who does not fit in to the orthodoxies of celebrity culture and or academia is left aside. It is my hope that in the reissuing of opinion on art written without fear or favor will point to possibilities of originality that now find difficulty to surface in a very controlled and sanitized art world. Buy the book here.

A few years ago I was browsing in my favorite used book shop when I came upon an English edition of Charles Blanc's Grammaire Des Arts Du Dessin by Kate Doggett. She published this translation in Chicago in 1879 as Grammar of Painting and Engraving. I immediately bought the book because I already knew a little of Charles Blanc, the French art critic and one-time Director of the Ecole Des Beaux-arts. His Grammar had influenced George Seurat, particularly in its treatment and diagrams of color theory and the optical effects of simultaneous contrast which led Seurat to his method of neoimpressionism. Not until I read the book, however, did I learn how thoroughly Blanc presented the idealized principles of the Beaux-arts Style and how great his influence was in those crucial years when the Beaux-arts tradition was being displaced by modernism. While Blanc's Grammar is a guide to basic principles, a kind of handbook of method for the artist, it is also a polemic of aesthetics based on Platonic ideal forms and types. The heart of this view is the idea of an eternal, perfect prototype for each class of things in nature; that is, typical, general forms to be imagined as the flawless molds of things that in nature are flawed, lesser, imperfect, individualized. The goal of the painter, for Blanc, is to imitate the ideal prototype, not nature itself. Blanc wants the painter to recognize that only through generalizing nature, seeking a type and not an individual, can one achieve what he termed Style, the imitation of the ideal prototype. Blanc refers to masters to illustrate his teaching: DaVinci, Raphael, Rembrandt. He turns to their preparatory sketches as examples of individualized life studies that are then redrawn to eliminate details and flaws of nature to instead reveal the general, the balanced, the universal: Style. Underlying or fused with this quest for the ideal or Style is Blanc's insistence on the moral. For him, and thus for the Beaux-arts painter, the means of imitation leads to the ends of expression of a spiritual ideal or template of that which supersedes nature and must be invented by the painter and is therefore an expression of the moral, or the true good. It is interesting that Blanc does not limit the moral in art to subject or narrative but to formal method. He does not say that some depictions are necessarily more moral than others simply because of their subject matter or any didactic function a painting may serve. He embeds the moral in the formal properties of art, in line, balance, light-dark, color, and most of all in unity, because these are the means by which an expression of ideal form can be achieved. However, Blanc does allow for genre painting aimed at realistic imitation of nature instead of Style. For instance a genre painting of a domestic scene may emphasize -- and carefully imitate the natural peculiarities of individuals and their environment for the sake of charm alone and thus eschew the higher aim of Style as a formal idealization. For such genre painting Blanc seems to imply that the moral is irrelevant because imitation of nature as it is does not involve Style. The fusion of the moral with the formal principles of the Beaux-arts Style is all but forgotten today. Now we think of the Beaux-arts tradition as encompassing a set of conventions that fell into decay and redundancy during the rise of modernism. We don't associate the moral with modernism. If the Beaux-arts sensibility of the moral was the expression of a universal ideal or type that lay beyond the reality of nature and is attained by formal idealization, the modernist sensibility replaced the idea of the moral with the idea of utopia which is best imagined as a social condition imitated in art and not as a spiritual aspiration. Yet the distinction is fuzzy. Even Blanc argued that the attainment of Style, or the ideal, could “...by its dignity, elevate the souls of men and nations...and reform the manners of men by its visible lessons.” Later, Mondrian had the same ambition for neo-plasticism. What of Rothko and Newman in this respect? And others? Although Blanc presumed that the human figure is the essential subject in art, his Grammar really transforms the figure into a set of abstract formal principles. He might just as well have been writing about rectangles and circles and in fact he did place geometry as the fundamental means by which the general can be induced from the particular. The point is that he saw those principles as moral in their capacity to elevate the human soul. Today, in the context of advanced abstract painting, it's considered largely foolish to speak of utopian art. In the face of a disintegrating globalism, utopian ideas are pinched and quaint. Moreover, it is certainly taboo, I believe, to speak of a moral abstract painting Paradoxically, however, the modernist tradition of formalist abstract painting continues unabated into its postmodern phase, reshuffling earlier iterations, adding and subtracting whatever is deemed peculiar to painting and its processes, no longer aiming for something that used to be called the moral or the utopian or even the spiritual -- and now dares not try -- veering instead to the ironic, the sardonic, the literal, and the individualized. It employs the means of Blanc's Beaux-arts Style but strays to other ends because the implication of expressing the moral is anathema in today's secular art-world. After all, the revolutionary nature of modernism required amoral, secular boundlessness. It is ludicrous to entertain the idea that there is indeed something that is off-limits in contemporary abstract painting. After a century and more of breaking down rules, presumptions and traditions of art, any informed painter is alert to the notion that nothing falls beyond the pale, nothing is taboo in painting -- except, as I now believe, the moral, the very essence of Blanc's formalist Style. The moral is excluded essence of contemporary abstract painting. By about 1910, the notion of the moral had already disappeared from modernist art theory yet the formal principles remained and were given a new role as not only the structure of painting but also its subject. In 1911 Wassily Kandinsky's essay, Concerning the Spiritual in Art proclaimed inner necessity as the fundamental source for artistic creation. Although inner necessity is separate from any formal principles it is an a-priori spiritual condition enabling the artist to employ formal elements somehow infused with that spirituality. We can't know what Kandinsky's spiritual inner necessity is except by feeling it in beholding the formal elements in art, expressed intuitively and independently of referenced subject matter. Inner necessity is a surrogate term for Blanc's notion of the moral except that for Kandinsky it is purely subjective, and for Blanc the moral is objective; that is, something inscribed by the rules and principles of formal Style. Much closer to Blanc's notion of the moral is Clive Bell's essay on Significant Form, published in 1914. Bell claims that what makes something art is not subject matter or even content (its theme) but simply the right arrangement of form. In this he agrees with Blanc but unlike Blanc he gives no rules or formal principles and no method for achieving significant form. For Bell, significant form exists objectively as a unity of formal elements but must, like Kandinsky's inner necessity, be apprehended subjectively and unlike Blanc, it follows no rule. Both Kandinsky's inner necessity and Bell?s significant form, in various mixes, are the basic conceptual contexts for modernist and postmodernist abstract painting. Both allude to Blanc's insistence that the formal principles of art, however they are described, embody a moral dimension, but in a wavering way, indecisively, and ultimately inverting it to amoral indifference. Inner necessity and significant form don't deliver what they inherently promise, the moral. Without the moral content formalism becomes arbitrary. Any impulse can be claimed for any expression of any so-called inner necessity. What expression does not begin as inner? Further, any configuration of form can be claimed as significant. After all, without Blanc's rather specific prescriptions for achieving the general and ideal, there is no way to discover insignificant form, let alone significant form. Here, then is the ultimate paradox, contradiction, and crisis in contemporary abstract painting. How can it persist in using the formal principles of art as the necessary and sufficient means by which aesthetic expression is possible while at the same time denying the intrinsic moral nature of those principles? Is it time to reexamine what is moral in abstract painting and in all serious art? To do so would mean to abandon the redundancy of irony and to overcome the one substantial taboo in contemporary art: The taboo against the moral. It would not require a return to Blanc's Beaux-arts Style but it might lead to a radical new use of Blanc's ideas. Bibliographic References: Bell, C. 1969. The Aesthetic Hypothesis. In Tillman, F., Mc Cahn, S., (Eds.), philosophy of Art from Plato to Wittgenstein, Harper & Row, New York, NY. pp 415-428, 1910. Doggett, Kate N., The Grammar of Painting and Engraving: Translated From The French of Blanc?s Grammaire DesArts DU Dessin, S.C. Griggs and Company, Chicago, 1879. Kandinsky, W., 1957, Concerning The Spiritual in Art, G. Wittenborn, Inc., New York, NY, 1912. Exclusively for Neoteric Art. ©William Conger, 2011 www.williamconger.com