When is a sculpture, an installation, a photograph, or a building really a painting? Ohio State University professors Stephen Melville, Laura Lisbon, and Philip Armstrong trade their mortarboards for curating caps, putting on a 110-piece, theoretically framed exhibition that examines the conditions of painting, both proper and im-. Half of the twenty-six artists included are French, and many of them, like Daniel Buren and Michel Parmentier, minister to painting’s corpse; we also find nonpainters like James Welling and Robert Smithson, who, the curators argue, address the medium, if more obliquely. It remains to be seen whether thinking of this rather various art “as painting” will be productive, or whether the exercise is purely academic.

— Katy Siegel