2. Neo Geo paintings of squares and dots and straight lines and so on -- monochromes as well -- were seen in the 80s as part of a general reaction against big, rough, expressionist paintings that made a big critical and commercial hit in the early part of the decade.

The rest of the reaction included a lot of other objects besides painting, from hand-written jokes and re-photographed ads by Richard Prince, to Jeff Koons's bronze aqualung casts and Plexiglas containers full of new vacuum cleaners. Another buzzword or critical term at this time besides Neo Geo was Simulationism -- an artwork simulating another artwork, or the memory of another image -- with the implication that there perhaps isn't any "original." The mood of all this work was expected to be ironic: the embarrassing past was being re-done for weird reasons.

As a viewer you knew this past, knew it was over -- a sort of academy of Conceptualism and Minimalism -- and you could tell that there was a funny frisson of naughtiness about re-doing it. At the same time there was something formally seductive there as well. Gradually this ironic mindset on the part of the typical art fan has faded, and the whole Neo Geo moment is itself a thing of the past. (Simulationism has faded even more.)

What does the seduction part mean when it's separated from clever thoughts? Styles answer other styles and then the argument between them doesn't have the urgency of meaning any more, it's just rhetorical: it can't explain what you're seeing either positively or negatively (as in, "It's in style" or "It's out of style").

Style is only a container, not like a subject -- something to paint -- but like a mood. Within the mood anything can happen. Frothy, tragic, funny, ghastly, cruel: these words for emotions don't mean anything in a world of rectangles: dusky, sharp, slow, heavy, delicate, shimmering, breathing -- large, flat, rough, empty -- zinging -- that's more like it -- but are they really telling you anything? A painting effect is actually a painting emotion.