“Das Bild sol die Funktion der Kartoffel übernehmen” (Jörg Immendorf) When I was a student at the Rietveld academy in the late eighties, I was taught that the modern artist is someone who has an Idea first and then searches a medium in which this Idea can be translated best. According to this concept, Ideas should be given material bodies in order to be communicated to a public. A modern artist was transmedial. Media where like clothes the contem-porary artist could choose to wear. Academic skills, technical abilities and craftsmanship where things we did not need to worry about. When this ideology would have been a strategy to free art academy’s of naked women who where to be painted group wise, I would have been able to understand it, but to my surprise I still hear quite a lot of colleagues an art educators, refer to the artist as the one with the ideas, the meaning maker. The logical counterpart of this development was the growing disdain towards the making of ob-jects. The art product was reduced to a vehicle for meaning. For our commissions and free work we where encouraged to collect images. And so everybody walked around with dummies full of cutout images. All studios were full of taped and tacked images from newspapers and magazines. The Ideas of the young meaning-maker-to-be were thought to grow out of this image compost. The collage replaced the drawing as a starting point for artworks and the installation became the target for us students. Looking back I think the most important change that took place during these years was that the creation of the artwork as a whole, shifted from the maker to the viewer. Artists made spatial compositions from parts of half digested information and the public were invited to create his own point of view between the scattered pieces. But education failed in my case. After four years of trying to become a contemporary transmedial artist I gave up. I decided that I was no longer interested in my own Ideas, that others had had much more beautiful ones and that I would become a painter. So I rented a studio and started to paint almost everyday for three years. In this period I developed and adopted the most painterly-artistic values I still believe to be the fundament of my work or to be even more positive, the paint-ings I dreamed of making in those years are the ones I am making now (but new dreams have come). This experience made me a persistent believer in the possibility of progress through prac-tice. The years that followed also made me quite sceptical about meaning making by artists. I have made several serious attempts to paint Jesus Christ in a contemporary context. Some peo-ple told me they where comforted by my courage to paint Him, but thought that as a painter, I did a lousy job. Others where lyrical about my virtuosity and craftsmanship but hoped I would soon be finished with this nonsense subject. My biggest collector stopped buying my work when Jesus ap-peared in it and new buyers came who thought my paintings where meant ironically. Critics wrote about me as being interested in the edge of kitsch and others that it was impossible to bring exist-ing religious imagery seriously into the context of contemporary art. I found out that it was not adequate to think of meaning as a source or a goal in art. Now I am us-ing meaning as an ingredient of images. I think of it not as something private, which needs to be translated in paintings and be read from them, but as something I already share with the public. An ingredient that is publicly available but only digestible when balanced with other ingredients and cooked well. Metaphorically I shifted from the Idea of image as a letter of which I am the writer to image as a meal of which I am the cook. With this metaphor of art as food I try to bend the attention from a discussion of meaning (which you can have very well about letters but which is pointless about food) to the evaluation of artworks in terms of taste, nourishment and health. Furthermore a letter stays physically outside us while food literally goes in, which makes our relation to it more existential. Where a discussion of mean-ing is dominated by the urge to deconstruct images before they approach us, the actual situation is that by far the most images enter us un-deconstructed and do their work in the lesser conscious levels of our being. Deconstruction and semiotics are tools to disarm images before they do us harm, when applied well, they prevent images to do their work. It often makes me sad to so many intelligent artists busy with disarming and destruction as a reaction to the stream of images that is produced like fast food in our so-called image culture. Instead of producing some real nourishment, a lot of artists have re-educated themselves and joined the ranks of image fighters. The evaluation of art in terms of taste is strangely underestimated; while actually there is so much evidence that acquired taste leads to quite objective judgements. I guess that most decisions in the art world: who are accepted as art students; who get the stipends; who wins the prizes and who is invited for a show are based on acquired taste and not on rational or even semi rational grounds. In this light it would be wise to think about taste more seriously as one of the most precise forms of objectivity and to give it a more articulate theoretical basis. The evaluation of art in terms of nourishment has to do with its ability to stay with us through time; how long can we live with and on it, is the artwork built in a such a way that it gives of its energy slowly and lasting or does the actual work become superfluous when its position in the discussion is clear. Nourishing art like nourishing food needs chewing which in the case of artworks has to do with the activity the senses must perform to get the image out of its material construction. Strength and energy come from images that give us the feeling that our existence is rooted, complex and related to others. Evaluation of art in terms of health is even more precarious. I am aware of the fact that he who wants to talk about healthy images, could not without reason, be suspected of wanting to call other images “entarted”. Without wanting to deny this danger I believe it is necessary to consider the possibility of images to be actively related to our moral health. It is not my aim to start another war but to find ways in which we could increase our responsibility as artists. The healthiness of images has as far as I am concerned, nothing to do with positvity, optimism or the perspective of a better world, on the contrary, I suppose I am not the only one to see that our world more and more be-comes a dangerous and scary place and that there is no reason to think that this tendency towards the apocalyptic will change in the near future. One of the things that people will need to survive mentally is the kind of encouragement that could be found in art and for which I, on this moment have no better word than health. Gijs Frieling (The title of this paper was taken from a painting by Jörg Immendorf, in which he appears as a co-ok in a theatrical setting for a public of fellow painters and museum directors. I regard Immendorf as an artist who analysed the situation of the painting and the painter much more serious than col-leagues as Gerhard Richter or Sigmar Polke, and with a lot more humour. But that is probably mo-re a subject for another paper.)