ABSTRACT
Abstract painting, especially of the minimalist or geometrical kind, is supposed to have been stripped of every aspect of representationism, and the demand is to evaluate it solely in terms of what it is in itself, as a physical object. The fact that reciprocation and cooperation do occur does not mean that some new order of explanation for social behaviour has emerged, higher than the causal operation of instinctual drives. Social rules and contingencies are just a particular class of the contingencies of nature, which individuals discover and which then modify their consummatory behaviours. Moral behaviour, then, is to be seen as a special sort of functioning of those drives which compose the ego. The instinctual forces that motivate the aesthetic endeavour are in the main those that have been subject to repression, but since the production of an art object also includes conscious ego-processes, then the ego-instincts must also have relaxed their defences against the repressed impulses.
