ABSTRACT
Michael Fried has returned to the distinction between "absorption" and "theatricality" in all of his art historical work since he first introduced the dyad in 1980 to illuminate the dynamics of the relationship between painting and beholder in eighteenth-century French painting and the critical writings of Denis Diderot. Fried shows that in the 1760s Jean-Baptiste Greuze inherits from Simeon Chardinthe value of absorption and transforms it into something new and nearly unrecognizable. Fried helps us see with clarity the connection between an artwork's handling of being-seen and its ontological force in the work of the contemporary photographer Jeff Wall. In Absorption and Theatricality Fried imagines that an artwork can secure the beholder's interest by dramatizing that it is not concerned with his presence at all, so that it works hard to foreground its active indifference and lack of consideration for him.
