I find it easier to deal with work wherein the subtleties are defined by clues as to the artist’s attitude (what Thomas McEvilley has called “attitudinal gestures”) rather than conveying some kind of mood. It doesn’t matter whether the attitude in a work is genuine, as long as attitude is evinced; audiences can consider attitude without being caught up in it. Mood, on the other hand, is more tricky. Mood is something the artist has to get the audience to slip into, and efforts to prompt such engagement usually leave traces of posturing or spin into narcissistic drama. And even if an artist can

In Marcelino Gonçalves’s provocatively titled Receiver (all works 2002), a beaming football beauty, his hair curly and lustrous, his smile exuberant, almost glows as he crouches, seemingly ready to score the winning touchdown—his life a series of wins, from the look of him—a yellow goalpost in the distance. Or so it would seem. The rendering of the gridiron idol is as clean and crisp as his jersey, but no actual jersey could be so fresh. The background field’s blurred greens and yellows suggest, perhaps, a photographer’s studio; and given the unsullied perfection of his jersey, the