MoMA Learning

To create What Is Painting, John Baldessari had someone else stretch the canvas and hired a professional sign-painter to hand-letter the text, which the artist took from a book about art appreciation. Baldessari conceived the idea for What Is Painting, while others realized it. The use of a definition of art and painting within a work of art brings to light what he sees as the irony in narrowly defining something that is so open to interpretation: “I’ve always been attracted to anyone that can blatantly say what art is. I just like that kind of audacity, or ignorance, one or the other.”

For Baldessari, “the wonderful irony about this piece is that it’s text. But in fact it is a painting, because it’s done with paint on canvas. So I’m really being very slyly ironic here in saying, ‘Well, this is what painting is.’”