There’s an interview on Catherine Spaeth’s blog with blogger Ed Winkleman, where he says, “I don’t have much interest in anti-formalist conceptualism…I have seen tons of conceptual art that doesn’t raise the bar for formalism…my idea of conceptual art is that it must be compelling visually.”

Agreed. And I’ll add that to be compelling visually, art must also be compelling conceptually. We’re in a new century, and it’s time we stopped categorizing art by medium—photography, painting, sculpture, video, installation, and so on, with conceptual art in another category. To succeed, all art must be conceptual, just as it must address formally its reason for being considered visual art.

The test is in how well the conceptual and the formal elements are synthesized—to the point that the ultimate experience of the art is about neither, but something else entirely.

Of course the wonderful thing about art is that it operates in a realm beyond language, so we may not be able to explain the concept—in fact it may be better if we can’t, because if it can be grasped fully in words, then the execution has no role other than that of illustration. Further, the best art may engage numerous concepts, which may or may not have been intended by the artist.

[And BTW, unless I’m doing graduate crits, I’m not interested in the “artist’s intention.” The experience is the experience, and what the artist was trying to do is of no value. This is why artists’ statements are irrelevant and, in fact, if not on a par with the art, can detract from it.]

So while we can’t define concept—or “content” as we’ve become accustomed to calling it—we know when it’s there and when it’s not. We can tell when abstraction crosses the line and becomes simply “design.” We know when realism is about rendering rather than something bigger, or when “concept” turns out to be no more than novelty.

The last century was about experimentation with media—as well as what could be done without it. But we’re over that. We’re over being excited about something just because it’s video, or because the artist figured out how to make something out of bat shit, and we’ve discovered that painting is still interesting because it’s the most plastic, and therefore most expressive of materials. Now that the toolbox has been opened and found to hold every possibility, the question is, in service to what? And how do we evaluate the results?

When I told Joanne Mattera that I was methodically cleaning my paintings and storage area, and she suggested I write about it, saying that storage is an issue for artists over the age of 35. Yep, the older you get, the more you have. And if being a painter of large paintings is bad, think about sculptors, yikes! These paintings have been so many places—from the pristine, climate-controlled warehouses of the Sidney Janis and Hirschl & Adler galleries, to grime-encrusted cubicles in the dark, scary labyrinth that is Chelsea Mini Storage, to the barn studio I got kicked out of with hardly any notice and rented a room from a friend in my apartment house to sleep so I could use my bedroom for storage, to the studio I shared with an amateur pornographer (who I thought was just a local businessman with an interest in photography until I found spread beaver shots next to the phone) where later a renovation took place in the gallery downstairs and every inch of everything in my workplace was coated with sheetrock dust for three months (when I complained, the owner—a New York art world impresario—asked why I didn’t just go on vacation until it was over), to the quaint mill studio attached to an auto repair garage where there was almost no heat and all the spiders of the western world convened…to here, my airy, clean, newly-renovated third floor atelier, with skylights and mountain views and nearly, but not quite, enough room for everything.

It speaks to the durability of oil paintings on canvas that they’ve survived being moved by everyone from professional art handlers (including one cross-country company with the encouraging slogan, “Every time an artwork is moved it dies a little”) to the likes of my handyman in the back of his pickup truck—with only one serious mishap, a slice from a box-cutter that was, fortunately, in the hands of a pro with insurance.

Compared to some of my friends (such as Lucio Pozzi, whose storage area looks like a branch of Costco) I don’t have that much. But I believe an artist’s own history is his/her greatest resource, and have kept to my practice of hanging onto the paintings where I made the most significant changes. However when you add those to my collection of half-baked paintings just waiting to get the new layer that will make them masterpieces (I don’t give up on anything), it adds up to a lot of stuff, especially for a person who, in the rest of her life, likes to keep stuff to a minimum.

So I’ve hired a teenager. Every day Leah comes for an hour or two (she has another job washing lettuce for her farmer father who, she tells me, outfitted a household washing machine to dry greens on the spin cycle) and together we unwrap the paintings, vacuum the backs, damp wipe the faces, re-wrap them in glassine, and clean the cardboard dividers. That’s the hard part, getting all that cardboard clean, but I’m too ecological (or cheap) to buy more, and besides, have no idea where to get 4 x 8 sheets here in the country now that the mills have closed. So there we are, Leah and me, down on the floor, scrubbing the cardboard with damp rags (actually microfiber Miracle Cloths, one of the all-time great inventions, up there with Velcro and Post-its). She likes the part where we throw all the old plastic sheeting and unsalvageable cardboard out the third floor window to the driveway below and says she can’t wait until someone asks her what she’s doing this summer so she can say, “Washing cardboard.” Me too.