 Barnett Newman’s (1905–1970) paintings, which often are merely monochromatic with single, straight “zips” or lines traversing them, is a paradigm of this. Newman’s paintings offer the “postmodern sublime”, for Lyotard. Everything in Newman’s paintings arrives in an instant, yet what arrives is what Lyotard calls the postmodern: the unpresentable in presentation itself. The paintings have no allusions, no modernist story to them. To their surfaces one can only ask “is it happening?” Any answer to the question fails since it would be attempting to represent what is not offered in the painting itself. In this way, the postmodern artist is modernist in the sense of seeking out what is new, not according to pre-established phrase regimens, but by exploring means for finding what cannot be articulated within any phrase regimens. Lyotard’s essays on Newman have had an indelible impact on aesthetics and understanding what has been underway in so-called postmodern art. When spectators complain that postmodern artists do not present anything to be understood or that their works withstand interpretation, Lyotard’s claim is that this is precisely the point: to stand against being recuperated within dominant modes of thinking. This is the ultimate argument that art is for art’s sake. Art need not provide a political message, represent reality properly, or morally guide us. Rather postmodern art would be that taking place of a self-enclosed event that withstands interpretation and is irreducible, as art, to any use value.