It is worth thinking about Julie Mehretu's paintings and drawings as perfect contemporary pictures - not because they necessarily are 'perfect' (whatever 'perfect' might mean), nor because Mehretu seeks such a quality (I suspect she does not), but because her achievement is predominantly celebrated on the basis of the virtuosity and thoroughness with which her pictures purportedly reflect the complexities of globalised existence.

If we take at face value the assertion that her paintings are indeed 'perfect metaphors for the increasingly interconnected and complex character of the 21st century', as Douglas Fogle described them on the occasion of her exhibition at the Walker Art Center in 2003, we can examine some of what seems to make Mehretu's work so compelling on this level of the 'perfect' metaphor (and also where this supposed perfection gives it cover).¹ But perhaps more interestingly, this approach allows us to consider what our embrace of her work suggests about the state of spectatorial engagement more generally - and what we want a painting to be, or do.

If we adjudicate 'perfection' as something approaching 'completeness', Mehretu indeed seems tough to beat. The shortlist of subject matter claimed by the artist and her critics is vast: flight patterns, architecture of all varieties, city squares, airports, highways, subways, scrambled computer screens, the imagined millennium computer bug, computer games, family genealogies, armies, maps, comets, stairwells, stadiums, amphitheaters, smoke, bullets, blazes, explosions, implosions, graffiti, comics, skateboard graphics, tattoos, racing stripes, hot-rod flames, news photographs of riots and uprisings, upraised fists, the Enron scandal, the WTO, the UN, the Arab League, Civil War strategic maps and NFL game plans. Among art-historical references, we find cited Baroque engravings,