Given my interest in painting, I found myself going to Milwaukee to see an exhibition that promised to be taking the pulse of contemporary American painting—all the works in it had been made in the last five years. A show of fifty paintings by fifty different painters who the curators claimed were defining the field of contemporary painting seemed a bold move, amidst the general confusion that has been generated by AI, market manipulation, auction house publicity, critical pronouncements, and a general cultural malaise that has lingered since the 1990s.