Q. What is a picture? A. An idea for a picture.

This idea is the product, not a finished picture in itself. The picture in its physical form is only worth the picture-idea it is capable of evoking. The potential of a work is the cognizability or imaginability it induces and can support.

The idea is not distinct from the object that evokes it, rather, the evocation is the result of subject coming into contact with it. 'Subject' could be formalized as a discrete object (a human animal) but the cognitive/imaginary field cannot ever be reduced to reification in a particular material complex (i.e. human organism) as this cognitive manoeuvre itself must take place in a perceiving and judging subject. The reducing agent is not reducible but infinitely relational and relatable.

The infinite quality (or intimation of infinity) that art seems to possess, is that quality in ourselves (in this experience we call 'being human'). It is a reflection of this experience that art effects – a projected reflection reflecting a projection.

Art only imperfectly lends itself to utilitarian purposes (such as mild social engineering via curatorial thematizing) not because 'it' struggles to say anything but because 'it' will always say more. Of course, by 'it' I mean 'we'. The art object, whatever its material and conceptual status, is a cache of communicative potential only in its ability to be perceived/conceived/received.

Perhaps this inutility is lamentable to a mind that hopes for an insect-like evolution of the human species – i.e. a constant and minimally reflective industriousness. I very much hope such a mind is absent and always will be. In answer to this disposition, art is inherently and immanently a future and utopic project in so far as it attends human beings who are not set on a goal; who are suspended¹, however briefly, from the causal chains of necessity and desire².

1Suspended, as in 'removed' but also, so as to fully profit from the verbal suggestiveness of 'suspension' and 'chains' as in 'slacking' or 'hanging around'.

2Perhaps the reason for much debate sticking on the necessity and desirability of art, is that art is an ontology of the obstruction of these engines of activity?