The Last Gasp of the Factory Sublime
One enters the current cycle of mega-gallery surveys expecting revelation and leaves with the mild nausea of déjà vu. These vast canvases, meticulously engineered by atelier teams, signed by the brand-name maestro, continue to gesture toward transcendence while delivering only the hollow echo of 1950s heroism.
The scale has inflated, the prices have ballooned, yet the pictorial intelligence has atrophied. What we are witnessing is not the late phase of a movement but the prolonged embalming of one. The factory model, once a pragmatic solution, has become the aesthetic itself: flawless surfaces that betray no hesitation, no risk, no trace of doubt. The result is painting as luxury commodity, impeccable, inert, and ultimately indifferent.
Collectors pay premiums for the illusion of singularity in works that are, by design, reproducible spectacles. Meanwhile, in studios far from Chelsea’s white cubes, a generation of painters are wrestling with image saturation, ecological collapse, diasporic identity, and digital embodiment, producing work of genuine urgency at a fraction of the price.
The market’s continued obsession with these geriatric abstractions is less a testament to their enduring power than to the inertia of capital. History will not be kind to this moment. It will record it as the period when painting’s establishment chose scale over substance, branding over breakthrough, and when a handful of factories kept churning out yesterday’s sublime for tomorrow’s storage units.