Paint, Misbehaving???

So this morning I came across this article called "Paint, Misbehaving"
You can read it here: http://blog.art21.org/2010/05/03/letter-from-london-paint-misbehaving
It begins "Writing about painting isn’t easy, simply because painting isn’t built to be written about." which grabbed me instantly. It then goes on to explain that "[...] writers writing about painting tend to rely on a checklist of clichés: the one about everyone thinking painting was dead [...] finding out it wasn’t. Or the one about painting lagging behind other forms of art because it isn’t brainy enough. Or the one about painting being challenged by photography, or besieged by video art, or troubled by conceptualism." So now you can add to that list: or they write about how difficult it is to write about painting.

But there is actually quite a bit of food for thought in this article particluarly here: "Some contemporary painters, admittedly, paint with an eye to their work’s transcription into a wall label or press release. [...] Similarly, a kind of ironic abstraction has tended to dominate painting in recent years, [...] That tradition slots in nicely with a dominant strain in other art practices, the tireless and joyless unpicking of modernist utopianism."
"Both strains in painting are hard to love, since they postpone or even nullify the principal joy of experiencing painting, which is looking at paint. The good news is that because of those think-first, act-later artists (who, you feel, might be happier not painting), there’s a certain amount of renewed attention given to painting in general."

The article goes on to look at the work of Angela de la Cruz, "asserting painting as an object in space, rather than as a window into a made-up world."

I think there is a lot of food for thought and maybe discussion here in this article or at the very least it's been a good excuse for me to add my first post to this Blog.