Jonathan Griffin

“Art should be about nothing,” my friend, the abstract painter Liam Everett told me recently. “It should be an encounter with a U.F.O., an unknown object you have to work out how to come to terms with.”

It’s a provocative, hard-line position, one more fitted to an artist than a critic. But given art’s recent turn toward the figurative, the literal, and the narrative, I too often find myself hankering for art that doesn’t try to tell me things. What the critic Peter Schjeldahl, writing on Piet Mondrian, recently termed “obdurate mystery.”