Editor's foreword -- Painting : In the interrogative mode -- Four shades of white : Ha Chong Hyun among others -- Color and its names : Joseph Marioni's approximately monochromatic paintings -- The 1 percent solution : Bernard Frize behind the surface -- Afterword to stripe painting : Karin Davie and feminism -- The invisible breath : Francesco Polenghi comes up for air -- Intimate convictions : Aspects of Juan Uslé -- Everyday painting : political-erotic-mystical -- Picturehood is powerful : John Currin, Catherine Howe, and Lisa Yuskavage -- Glimpses past the edge : Peter Doig's mysterious spaces -- Apparently ordinary : The stubborn art of Lois Dodd -- Framing the view : Maureen Gallace and the unknowable -- This is what things look like : Alex Katz in the present -- Blackness as code : Karry James Marshall's enigmatic authority -- Strange reversals : Nicole Eisenman's path to genius -- The painter and his double : Tal R meets Shlomo -- Perceptibility : Ellen Altfest looks back -- Sheer sensation : Photographically based painting and modernism -- The observer effect : Changing art history -- Abandoning painting and painting with abandon : Tsibi Geva and the Readymade -- Painting betrayed : Arnaldo Roche Rabell's technique -- "Violent, cartoonish, obscene, voracious" : Sue William's project for a new century -- Abolished still life : Lesley Vance and darkness -- Human presence : Nicola Tyson and the other homunculus -- Between painting and picture : Dana Schutz entertains herself -- No laughing matter : Werner Büttner -- A separate look : Apostolos Georgiou's predicaments -- Object or project? : A critic's reflections on the ontology of art -- A conversation with Andrew Hunt.

"Many consider Barry Schwabsky to be the critic on painting today, even if he does write copiously on other art forms, write editors Rob Colvin and Sherman Sam in their foreword to this selection of Schwabsky's writings. Written since the turn of the millennium, the texts in 'The Oberver Effect' include meditations on the broader context of painting today alongside reflections on such well-known American painters as Alex Katz, Kerry James Marshall, Nicole Eisenman, and Dana Schutz, as well as practitioners from Europe and beyond, Bernard Frize, Tal R, and Ha Chonghyun among them. As Colvin and Sam point out, the book documents a dialogue between abstraction and the image in which images serve less to represent their described subject than to articulate the sort of painting each one desires to be"--Publisher's description.