In this episode, recorded live at City and Guilds Art School in London, Matt and Andrea read Douglas Crimp's essay, 'The End of Painting' from 1981 alongside a number of texts and a video by Helen Molesworth on the painter Noah Davis from 2020.
Crimp's essay makes the bold, and often repeated claim that painting has somehow ended. This opens up interesting questions about what has happened in painting since the 1980's. Can painting have criticality? If so, what is the nature of it?
With Molesworth's writing and video on Noah Davis, we will examine the work of a contemporary painter whose engagement with the medium was motivated by a different set of desires and concerns from the ones laid out by Crimp. If painting has ended, who has it ended for and why? If painting persists, what does it do for artists who paint?
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Download PDFs of the texts below
Crimp, Douglas. ‘The End of Painting’. October 16 (1981): 69–86. Download PDF
Molesworth, Helen. ‘40 Acres and a Unicorn’. In Noah Davis. Prestel, 2024. Download PDF
Molesworth, Helen. ‘Noah Davis: An Introduction’ and ‘Some Years Count as Double’ In Noah Davis, with Noah Davis. David Zwirner Books ; The Underground Museum, 2020. Download PDF
Molesworth, Helen. ‘Video: Helen Molesworth Introduces Noah Davis’. David Zwirner. Accessed 14 April 2026. Link: https://www.davidzwirner.com/news/2020/helen-molesworth-noah-davis-walkthrough-video.
We also mentioned a number of other texts and videos, listed below:
Crimp, Douglas. ‘Pictures’. October 8 (1979): 75–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/778227.
Davis, Noah. ‘Noah Davis Lecture at Corcoran School of Art’. 2011. https://vimeo.com/31541073.
‘Oral History Interview with Douglas Crimp, 2009 March 8 | Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution’. Text. Accessed 16 April 2026. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-douglas-crimp-15791.
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