Sink Or Nirvana: Into The Plight Of Easel Painting

In this thesis, we mainly deliberate over the prospects of easel painting by analyzing the current situation of contemporary western art, point out that easel painting should pursue the charm of its own language, instead of selecting the conceptual way.Easel painting, confronting the consummate end of visual system, seemed to has immersed into an unprecedented predicament. Arther Danto, the American art historian, had declared the death of pictorial art long before, but actually pictorial art still keeps its vitality after about half a century, not as a main current though. What kind of regulation should people rely on to view art in the state of "Post-Modernism"? What kind of incitement and satisfactory does the well completed visual system require? We analyze the vitality source of easel painting from the angle of art psychology such as visual perception, phenomenology and etc, then raise the opinion that conceptual way is unsuitable for easel painting.Painting as one propeller to conception, has strong restriction on conceptualization. Blind conceptualization will lead to the simplification of plentiful languages which art itself has, and eventually result in the dying out of those wonderful languages.We go step further to elaborate the charm of painting from three angles: first, two-dimensional picture presents three-dimensional image; second, the glamour of formal language; third, the tension of instant intervenient and constant intervenient...