Discovered Beauty: Towards a Contemporary Formalism
Matthew Herriot, 2026
In the 1990s, arguments for the return of beauty in painting defended visual pleasure against theoretical explanations. Those arguments succeeded, and today, visual pleasure is widely embraced. The problem has now shifted: while visual pleasure can be found virtually everywhere in contemporary art, this has come at the expense of the conditions that make real aesthetic experience possible. A reevaluation of beauty in painting is therefore necessary to separate decorative stylization from genuine aesthetic discovery.
The idea that formal resolve can separate “good” from “bad” painting has been dismantled time and again since the 1960s, when prominent critics such as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried declared aesthetic unity and medium-specific clarity as painting’s highest values. Known as Formalism, this evaluation framework had so much cultural influence that artists, feeling trapped by its narrow parameters, eventually dismissed the idea of any hierarchy of quality altogether. The very idea that a universal standard can be applied to painting is not only deeply unfashionable but unspeakable today; after all, what someone finds compelling in painting is just their personal, subjective taste, and taste widely varies across different people.
What if the push away from universal values of beauty should not have been totalizing? What if there remain some paintings today whose meaning is not extrinsic to its form but inseparable from it, yet cannot be reduced to craft, skill, or decoration? And, most importantly, what if these paintings are convincing not based on any specific criteria of form and material, as with outdated Formalism, but based on an understanding of how true beauty can occur through painting?
A viable theory of beauty in painting today has to begin by clearing away a common assumption: that it arises through pleasing associations, such as soft, sunset-like colors, atmospheric effects, or expressive brushwork. These paintings work because they activate memory and recognition: you see something you already know how to enjoy, momentarily satisfying the eye through familiarity and comfort. They reflect your worldviews and aesthetic ideals back towards you. The audience passively receives the painting as a designed, aesthetic product.
Compare this to aesthetic experiences in ordinary life—the flicker of sunlight passing through a grouping of trees, the crisp shadow cast on a warm brick building, or a cloud of steam reaching the sky on a cold morning. None of these events were designed for the perception of beauty in that moment, in that light, through your eyes. The experience of beauty is spontaneously initiated by the viewer, originating in the viewer, in a moment of non-self-conscious perception of the world.
This kind of discovered beauty is largely absent in contemporary painting because many paintings today either perform the spectacle of beauty through refined design choices—such as an artist making an expressive mark because it conjures a known, acceptable style—or they intentionally avoid aesthetic norms, presenting an “ugly” painting or a “conceptual-looking” arrangement of objects for academic reasons. What both of these present-day conventions are missing is an understanding of the conditions in which a real experience of beauty emerges in the mind: unprompted and without expectation.
A painting that suspends the viewer’s expectation of beauty by appearing either unrefined or strange in some way opens the possibility for the experience of beauty to originate spontaneously within the viewer, as a self-generated, present judgment. This discovered beauty is distinct from beauty by design, and is what separates art from decoration.
The artist seeking discovered beauty is acting on the line between maintaining and losing control, through wanting to make something pleasing yet also needing to disrupt their habits to uncover the unanticipated. Sometimes a painting will successfully destabilize the expectation of beauty without having enough coherence for any beauty to emerge in the eyes of the viewer. But when a painting actually survives this destabilization and beauty still emerges, it becomes an exceedingly rare and vital object. Simply put, a good painting suspends the expectation of beauty while still allowing for its possibility.
Discovered beauty thus offers a model for making paintings without the need for explicit theoretical justification, neither as a nostalgic imitation of past movements nor a tenuous declaration of novelty. In a time of style saturation and the surge of commercial decoration, this framework of discovered beauty remains one of the few viable ways painting can still produce real aesthetic experience.