Formality Is Dead

July 2, 2025

There was a time when painting came with a dress code. You needed to know how to render a human figure with anatomical precision. You needed the right brushes, the right canvas, the right pedigree. You needed the language—the formal language—of painting. Technique was currency. Style was king. To be taken seriously, you had to speak that dialect fluently.

But something happened. Or maybe many things happened.

Now, we live in a moment where the formalities in painting are no longer necessary. The technical skill, the academic lineage, the polished execution—they’ve been dethroned. Not forgotten, not irrelevant, but no longer the gatekeepers. Today, what matters is something more elusive: the idea. What is being said? What does it make us feel or think? What conversation does it start or disrupt?

There’s something liberating in this shift. You don’t need to paint like Caravaggio to be a painter. You can scribble, you can glue, you can slash, you can leave vast stretches of canvas untouched. You can break every rule in the book—if you even bothered to read the book—and still make something powerful. If nothing else, it must be interesting.

Interesting is the new barometer.

That’s not to say technique is worthless. A well-crafted image still stirs awe. But technique alone isn’t enough. In fact, too much polish can kill curiosity. If the painting is a pristine surface that says nothing, offers nothing, dares nothing—what’s the point? A technically perfect painting that fails to engage is like a beautifully wrapped gift box that’s empty inside.

We’re more willing now to tolerate the rough edges. To sit with the ugly or the unresolved. We’re drawn to work that makes us pause, or lean in, or tilt our heads—not necessarily because it’s beautiful, but because it says something we didn’t know we wanted to hear.

A crude drawing with a raw truth can outshine a classical composition with nothing to say.

And this shift reflects more than just a change in aesthetics. It reflects who we are and how we live now. We scroll past a thousand images a day—flawless, filtered, curated. In a world that is visually oversaturated, the interesting image is the one that interrupts. It’s the one that insists: Look again.

Painting has always been about more than paint. It’s about attention. It’s about time. It’s about what we choose to preserve, to express, to resist. Formality may have once been the structure that held those impulses in place. But now the structure is looser. Maybe even broken. And that’s okay.

Because what’s emerging in its place is something more open, more human, more urgent. Ideas made visible.

The question is no longer “Can this be called painting?” The better question is: “Does this make me feel something real?”

And if the answer is yes, then that’s enough.