http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/uncategorized/squeegee

"...a feathering back trick which might (just) be read as signifiers of 
the televisual or some strangely dot-free web-fed offset, so long as 
everyone present agrees."

The brushwork in Richter's photograph-based paintings does double duty 
as suitably virtuoso painterly marks and as a signalisation of the noise 
of analogue media. They are dialectical, a dialog between two forms and 
two meanings contained in the same acts. They are ironic, changing the 
meaning of signifiers (at the technical level of brush-mark and blur) 
without changing their form. For all the conservatism of Richter's work, 
this is interesting.

It's difficult to imagine a digitally sourced Richter. LCDs present 
different challenges and affordances than grain and phosphor, and 
mosaics don't have the same position within art history as scumbling. 
Sure, there's all the noise of JPEG compression, and this could just 
about be rendered in a painterly manner, although it would probably take 
a painter with more mastery of glazes and washes than is fashionable (or 
art historically anchorable within modernism). Forget the jaggies of 
GIFs, the net's equivalent of woodcut (or possibly linocut), although a 
thousand future Lichtensteins won't. The temptation is stencils, but 
that would have to use spraycans rather than oils, and Banksy has 
blocked that particular pipe.

*Digital noise* is a very different challenge to painting than 
*analogue noise*, and we're past the period where CRTs helped to obscure 
this.

- Rob.

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