On the Incoherence of Eric Bayless-Hall’s “Sense of Meaning”
A Letter to the EditorFrom Daran Mousý, April 3, 2026
Re: Reflections from a Dead End, Flora Yukhnovich’s Four Seasons at The Frick by Eric Bayless-Hall
To the Editor of Perseity Art Review,I’ll keep it brief. In his recent review of Flora Yukhnovich’s Four Seasons Eric Bayless-Hall makes a few remarks about meaning. First, and most generally, he writes that “a work is meaningful which we want to keep attending to, turning and returning to.” (Elsewhere he suggests that we are never done perceiving such things.) He goes on to criticize Yukhnovich’s work for not rewarding our attention. Here’s the full passage, with relevant parts in bold:
The most promising thought is that the outgrowth and interplay of forms in Four Seasons might become an image of the organic itself—that the abundance might not be abundance merely, that the discovery of forms in the thicket of shapes might be more than a game of recognition in a crowd, that the painter’s interest in paint’s suggestiveness might come to more than the sense—which by itself is not confirmed to be more than the hallucination—of meaning. You see, if all this painting has to offer is its abundance of stuff to look at, and that looking doesn’t coincide with any deepening or broadening of one’s sense of it, then we are to conclude that it is just a dead end to enter once. And at that point it is just a pretty wallpaper or background, to be grouped with the Edge observation deck, not the Frick’s masterpieces. At that point—though I never thought I’d say it—why not let people take pictures?There is an obvious tension and a less-than-obvious emptiness in Bayless-Hall’s notion of meaning here: on the one hand, meaning is something that deepens and broadens—this goes hand-in-hand with his earlier formulation that meaning is that on account of which we keep attending to something. On the other hand, the sense of meaning is not confirmed to be more than the hallucination of meaning. And here’s where I think Bayless-Hall has no resources to spell out just what the difference would be, or what could make the difference, between meaning and the hallucination of meaning. For telling the difference would require arriving at something, some criterion for meaning or meaningfulness, the absence or presence of which would determine whether a given case is a hallucination of meaning or the real thing. And the discovery of such a criterion is precisely what he has made impossible by saying that the meaningful thing is what we are never done attending to. We will, it seems, never find out whether we weren’t hallucinating the meaning of the work. We will die sooner than finish looking. This is—correct me if I’m wrong—straightforwardly absurd.