I have taught drawing and painting to undergraduates for nearly as long, and have been an abstract painter for around 25 years.

From both perspectives, I have concluded that painting, in terms of its influence on contemporary culture, continues to be marginalized.

Just take a prominent example of painting's situation as we approach the 21st century: The lists of last year's finalists for the modern art world's two Oscar-like awards -- the Turner Prize, in Britain, and the Hugo Boss Prize, handed out by the Guggenheim Museum -- included not one painter. In actuality, among painters, many artists and non-painters alike, it is quietly acknowledged that the effect on the culture of painting is nil. Painting is seen as, at best, an esoteric activity for a few diehards. At worst, it's considered destructively elitist, a portion of the"oppressor culture" of dead white European men. The public -- attached to computers, television, and movies -- hardly registers painting as having anything relevant to say. The only question is whether there's any audience at all for painting and, even if there is, how to preserve it.

This essay is a defense of painting, painting's most difficult to comprehend and irrelevant kind that exists. By limiting my topic to abstract painting -- which focuses on structure and builds a whole flat reality from colour, surface, shape, traces of the hand, mistakes, and adjustments -- I can best deal with the question of why anybody should continue to make paintings, when so many more visually powerful media are available.

In defending abstract painting, I need to toss overboard some extra baggage. I take as my model the abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, who thought that the claims of the Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s and'50s amounted to poppycock. To give painting back its dignity, he put forth, both in his own paintings and at a collection of"dogmatic" statements, exactly what abstract painting isn't. Allow me, in the spirit of Ad Reinhardt, to set forth my list of what abstract painting is not:

First, abstract painting is not a vehicle for social or political change, even if its pioneers thought it was. Today, even more than in Reinhardt's day, if even a figurative painter paints a picture that argues a particular social or political perspective, its effect -- in a society bombarded with books, magazines, papers, photographs, movies, television, video, and computers -- is ridiculously tiny. The chances are even fewer with abstract painting.

Abstract painting isn't avant-garde. It is, although it was in 1915. With regard to its ability to shock anyone -- the rallying cry of this now-defunct avant-garde -- painting today is feeble when compared with the power of the media mentioned above.

Third, abstract painting hasn't been, and most likely never will be, widely popular. Yes, its pioneers -- Malevich, Kandinsky, Mondrian -- all held utopian hopes but they were proved poignantly . Abstract painting turned out to be too subtle, too self-referential, too slow, too demanding of the viewer's patience, and too easy to poke fun at ever to attract a mass audience.

Finally, abstract painting can't offer you much of what we call Deep Hidden Meaning, in how religion or philosophy can. Put abstract painting cannot provide a replacement for God -- the reduction of whom is the earmark of modernism. Indeed, the ability of painting to move people is considerably weaker than that of other arts, such as poetry, theater, novels, or music.

To continue at a spirit than that of Reinhardt -- here is what abstract painting could do:

It provides what I'll call Little Hidden Meaning. To a viewer that can look at a still picture (for some, a tricky prospect), and who's knowledgeable enough to put an abstract painting in the context of contemporary art as a whole, abstract painting provides a de facto philosophical viewpoint on life. There is a belief, coming from our lingering attachment and from our own narcissistic age, that abstraction is always about self-expression. In the broadest sense it is, of course, but it's also about ideas -- the intricate struggle between order and chaos, by way of example, or how the flux of the organic world influences the rigor of geometry.

Second, abstract painting can empower us to be quiet. Painting makes allowing for a slow waltz.

Third, abstract art provides a counter to our society's glut of things. An abstract painting is a part of the material world, a thing, of course. However, it reminds people of a planet without things. It suggests the old concept, now hardly remembered, that there might be a hidden, underlying order, which the transience of life's things can not affect.

Fourth, abstract painting is often, quite simply, beautiful -- although that assertion is subject to enormous dispute. Artists from the birth of modernism on have substituted the pursuit of truth for the pursuit of beauty -- reality in understanding, truth in shape, truth in materials. Many artists -- rightly -- are leery of the very idea of this beautiful, as it so easily petrifies into some rigid standard. Once locked into place,"beauty" obliterates the wide selection of subtle variations within it.

Most baffling of all, hidden within the notion of beauty and folded up are conflicting values. Beauty implies an inequality from the way things look. There is everything in between, and ugliness, if there's beauty. That type of ranking offends our democratic sense of justice, because we moderns have defined justice as that which most closely approximates equality.

However, some people can't help their"elitist," or meritocratic, impulses when it comes to aesthetics, and are struck dumb by how utterly amazing an abstract painting could be.

A fifth virtue of abstract painting is that it is not a story, particularly not one from the most easily accessible facet of culture, which is all stories. We are bombarded with endless stories -- in television shows, advertisements, books, movies, and virtual-reality games. By way of telling stories We're constantly teaching and preaching, persuading and dissuading. Picking up on that aspect of our civilization, many non-abstract painters have added stories, or"narratives," into their paintings. But abstract painting resists narration and presents itself at once, as a whole or a oneness that can't, and never will, tell a story.

A last virtue of abstract painting is its very uncamera-like, uncomputer-like nature. The camera is so powerful that lots of people have reached the point where they can see the world only photographically or cinematically, and have lost the ability to see it in different ways. Before long, people will see the world only digitally.

It defies translation into data, information, entertainment, rational image, or any type of narrative. It presents an ineffable equilibrium of sensation, experience, and knowledge. In the middle of a world in which everything we see is morphing into something else, abstract painting is among the few things left that enable us to see the prospect of something's remaining constant.

If what I'm saying about the virtues of abstract painting is true, then why is not there more interest in this artwork? It won't do to start listing all the abstract painters around, since the point is that few people pay much attention to them, compared with either figurative artists generally, or new-media artists working with sound and video installations. Yes, abstract painters still exist, however they're an aging lot, for the most part ignored. More worrisome is the seeming absence of a new generation of youthful and enthusiastic abstract painters. How can it be that abstract painting, a significant participant in most of 20th-century artwork, has arrived at this sorry point, where it is barely a contender?

I suggest that the answer is rooted in two irrevocable changes that happened in the 19th century: First, the invention of photography, in 1839, and second, the general upheaval in philosophy. The invention of photography allowed anybody, even someone who had no painting or drawing skills, to fix an image of the real world on a level surface quickly and correctly. The painter suddenly seemed slow and insignificant in his way of replicating the appearance of reality.

More important, photography threw into question the whole raison d'etre of painting. For if the camera has been recording the world objectively through light rays bouncing off objects, then painting, by comparison, looked subjective, even fictive. If painters could not compete with the camera in mimicking fact, they would argue an alternative objective truth: All individual perceptions are accurate -- to the perceiver -- and therefore equally valid.

That fundamental change in outlook changed the appearance of art in the modern age. It was a shift which is, faking, telling to intent, which relied on telling the truth, as being true, understood by artists.

After Freud and Darwin, artists didn't concern themselves with beauty anymore, except as a byproduct, or an aside, as they played and manipulated with form. Philosophy attempted to come forth with a solution. It would protect beauty by separating it from destructive scientific analysis, and leave it alone as a"subjective" judgment. Philosophy yielded its position as interpreter of the world. Science then broke leaving everything behind, as rubble that was subjective, including poor philosophy. This rubble reconstituted itself as relativism's substance -- the notion that aesthetic and moral judgments are subject to flux. Relativism was around at least since Plato, of course, but the modern age marked the success of the relativist position.

The relativist reply to any pretension to universal truth, beauty, or power is, in effect,"Oh, yeah?" Relativism's hatchet man is irony. To condense an awful lot of the background of 20th-century art into one sentence: The past 80 years have consisted basically of a battle between the ironists, who have reveled in the impossibility of universal truths, and the holdout universalists, who've tried to rebuild classical philosophical truths in a contemporary visual language. In other words, it's been Duchamp versus Mondrian. And Duchamp is the winner -- although more by sacrifice than by knockout.

It required Duchamp a while to win. Until then, when Pop Art burst Abstract Expressionism's bubble, it had been coasting on its inflated standing; at that point, Pop Art sprouted from the smart, witty seed which Duchamp had planted a half-century earlier. Pop Art consisted mainly of paintings on canvas to be certain. But they were self-destructive. Pop Art's implied message was that it was the appropriated images that counted -- the Campbell's soup cans, Marilyn Monroe -- rather than the way in which paint was put on the canvas. Painting had always been centered on the artist's signature, but now painting concerned the content or picture.

Since World War II, our civilization has steadily evolved into what we recognize as"mass culture" -- one where millions of people's interests are simultaneously and speedily gratified through popular music, movies, sports, and celebrities. Fewer and fewer people care no more about the slow action called painting. Beginning in the late'60s and artists, attracted to the art forms of installation, performance, and video art, abandoned painting in droves. They'd grown up with TV and rock'n' roster; they were hip, smart, and eloquent; they knew and embraced the seductiveness and power of popular culture, and they wanted in on it.

We reclusive and out-of-it and trendy on the one hand, have arrived at a branch in the art world: fashionable on the other. How do remain at the face of that?

First, they must separate themselves from popular culture, rather than try to become players. They have to reargue the case for art -- an art requiring a viewer that is subtle, sensitive, experienced, and even exceptional. Abstract artists are currently making . They need to admit this to find meaning in abstract painting takes some help, and even some work.

And abstract painters ought to observe loudly, rather than apologize for, their artwork's character. The revolution itself -- the second that invented abstraction -- must have been electrifying, but that moment is forever over. For contemporary painters and their viewers, the experience is different from what it was due to their forebears. Abstract art is a pleasure rather than a dizzying thrill. The conventions are established, just as in baseball, and to derive pleasure from abstraction requires accepting its basic rules rather than always deconstructing them.

Yes, abstract art is elitist, and abstract artists should be upfront about that. However, you don't have to stop loving the struggles or The X-Files to understand and enjoy abstract art. Nor do you need to be a white male of royal blood. Yes, it's a product of European culture, but so are computers, airplanes, penicillin, and this essay. There are patrons of abstract painting, and abstract painters, of both genders and all races.

Today, many, if not most artists trying to get a rung up on the art-world ladder don't care one whit about painting or its own tradition in history. In actuality, aside from the fashion for discovering one's"roots," they are not interested in seeing history as something to belong to, or to be a part of, or to proceed. The issue for them is identity than aesthetics, although many young, non-white artists indeed refer to their heritage in their artwork. The point is, most young musicians (whatever their race or sex) prefer to view history, especially art history, as a massive quantity of information that at times is helpful for rummaging around in for ironic references, but which mostly gallery of abstract oil painting is a pain in the neck and best left ignored.

If we pull back from the abyss of Nietzsche's image of our condition, one workable premise: It is history, used properly can be taken from him by us. But what, exactly, is the use of history? People today distrust it. Because they are convinced that understanding is a smokescreen for power they wish to know who is doing the telling and .

Unfortunately, however, it is only when visual history's non-ironic use is coupled with the desire that is specific to make images that the artist, in particular, can learn painted abstract images and the meaning of painting's visual language. No matter what, some people -- even some artists -- will never"get" abstract painting, for reasons that range in their belief that all art is political to their poor visual aptitude. In the end, abstract painting is going to attract an audience more likely than to watch Sarah McLachlan on MTV, to read the Aeneid.

But small because its audience may be painting can, indeed, say something. As a colleague of mine from Hofstra University, the late Michael Gordon (himself a painter), frequently argued, it sets up a powerful moral parallel to the manner in which we lead our lives. Painters do not start their paintings in a vacuum. They build on the foundation of historical abstraction. Paintings are the result of an accumulation of settlements, wrong turns, corrections, and errors. Painters paint the way we all lead our lives -- rebelling against the givens and the choices, the actions that are purposeful and the accidents and building on. An abstract painting offers the perfect metaphor for life.

George Orwell said that each and every man at 50 has. In space and virtual time, there's absolutely no face. Everything is a toggle choice that wipes out the previous smiles or frowns and obliterates"bad" or"wrong" choices. In a computer picture, of course, there no longer exists even the concept of a mistake, since all signs of it is destroyable and retrievable. When we take away the ability to make a genuine error in art, one that can't be wiped out, the last image does not have any wrinkles. It carries only a rigid veneer, such as the continuously stretched faces of 65-year-old Park Avenue matrons. In a glance, those women look quite nice. But a longer appearance yields blankness. It's through our sins, our mistakes and, indeed, both in life and in art, that we gain the capacity for redemption that is possible and improvisation.

Because it attracted attention, painting was the sound in the culture. Now, the culture is the noise, and painting -- notably painting -- attracts little attention, either in the culture at large or in the art world. Abstract painting's saving virtue is that it offers us quiet, not sound. There's indeed a cultural catastrophe at the end of the 20th century: the constant flux of everything, and the death of stillness. Our culture cans not change, but neither may installation art, computer art, nor attempts at appropriation, no matter they are. Those art forms that the media that is appropriate are doomed to seem worse, or pale compared to them, to be squeezed down to their black hole that is vast. The ability of painting is this: It is a world superbly from our materialistic ironic, stylish age.