In every work of art there is an irreducible singularity; a fund of affect and visual event that is inexhaustible. But with so much art to see in so many locations, the pace of consumption has accelerated, provoking new ways of looking. At the Museum of Modern Art, for instance, visitors move from painting to painting taking cell phone pictures—storing up artworks for a future moment of contemplation that may never arrive. The art world is now a vast accumulation of potential energy, largely accessible on-line, but beyond the capacities of any individual to consume: a giant reservoir of deferred experience. This dynamic—of massive accumulation amidst endemic distraction—suggests why painting has acquired new forms and new relevance.

Abstract Expressionism linked personal touch to aesthetic intelligence, resulting in an array of signature styles. Such procedures as Jackson Pollock’s dripping and flinging of paint, for instance, qualify as intelligent because through them, mute sensation became articulate—even capable of capturing the unconscious as various commentators and the artist himself proposed. In his classic drip paintings Pollock opened an aesthetic threshold between pure disorganized sensation and its (materially) organized articulation. In the early twenty-first century this threshold has shifted. The mark has come to occupy the threshold between matter and the “picture,” defined by Pop and Appropriation as a commodified image. The painterly mark of our time embodies a paradox: between touch as an index of affect, and touch as the automatic transcription of information. It carries a new kind of artificial intelligence.