“Art is not ‘about.’ Art is,” the painter and critic Walter Darby Bannard often said. His shorthand dismissal of work that demands explication rather than yielding directly to sensory experience summed up an attitude shared by his friends and colleagues. Speaking of how one judges a painting, Bannard’s friend Larry Poons asserted that “It’s only your senses that can ever determine—it’s senses before words.” Works of art that require discussion of what they are “about” are most often essentially illustrations of carefully considered ideas and meanings more easily expressed verbally than visually. As Poons described this type of work:

There are things that look like paintings, but they’re not. They can be a kind of propaganda—posters, illustrations, this, that, and the other thing—which can be wonderful. But they’re not the same. They’re different from Cézanne or Pollock.

Rather than preconceiving an image, these painters responded to what emerged as they manipulated their materials.

In recent years, starting well before coviddisrupted the art world’s usual rhythms, art that was “about” dominated what was deemed worthy of attention. No matter the medium, any work of art required a reference to politics, sociology, sexuality, climate change, and all the rest if it was to be taken seriously. For the most part, work answering these requirements was figurative, but what it was “about” didn’t have to be visible; it simply had to be announced. Witness Gerhard Richter’s (much-acclaimed) abstractions that, we are told, bury reproductions of photographs of