As she sat there devouring her bucatini con le polpette, she somehow made an associative leap and found herself wondering whether abstract painting wasn't due for a spaghettiandmeatballs recuperation. After all, it had enjoyed a history similar to that of Italian-American cuisine. Both had appeared early in the 20th century and were widely received with suspicion and derision (all that garlic!); both enjoyed a mid-century, early-adopter hipster appeal that inevitably subsided, though not before preparing the ground for a broader mass appeal, which precipitated a fall from grace in the perception of elites, who came to see these phenomena as boring and outmoded. Artists continued to make abstract painting in large numbers, more than ever before, but, as with cooks of spaghetti and meatballs, they were amateur or otherwise removed from the real conversation, not cutting-edge professionals in sophisticated contexts.
Someone, she realised, needed to come along and devise a painterly abstraction that embodied cultural sophistication and “nowness”. It had to look classically tasteful and refer to well-known historicalcultural production available to only the wealthy few: fine art. But she knew this was the way of all culture, all trends: a continuous flow from top to bottom and back again, as in a trick fountain.
