As regulars here will know by now, the unprovoked visiting of art galleries just to look at pictures or sculptures is not something I often do. But, rootling about in the arts pages of the electrical national dailies, just to get my culture blogging done for the day, I came across an article about Bridget Riley from which I actually learned something. (This is the best set of Bridget Riley images I could find by googling.)

I wouldn't want to go overboard. The writer, Adrian Searle of the Guardian, is after all a writer about modern art for the Guardian, so as to what the things are about and what exactly they signify, it's anyone's mad random guess and he guesses away madly and randomly like he's paid to.

… Description tends to deaden a body of work which at its best is full of life, sensation, and a fugitive equivalence to the visual world in which we live. Her paintings aren't "like" anything.

Well, actually they're like post-sixties wallpaper and fabric designs, for in Bridget Riley's case life has imitated art on a huge scale.

A Riley is a Riley, a chunk of sensation, a singular field, an event, an encounter. A Bridget Riley painting is not a depiction. This singularity is peculiar, …

Whereas all other paintings these days are "depictions". Get a grip man. No, sorry, don't. That's good. That's tripe and it's what you're paid for. Blah blah blah.

But now it gets informative. This particular blah is based on a fact, and a fact I was not until now aware of. I've always found Riley's pictures to be pretty, but I didn't know how she did them, until now.

… given that her paintings are made by other hands. From the early 1960s, she has used assistants to manufacture her paintings, after her own production of numerous studies, drawings, variations, diagrams and colour swatch tests, in which every colour relationship is fine-tuned in terms of its hue-value, saturation, its place on the tonal scale, as well as in terms of its opacity, its flow, its gloss or mattness, its maleability as a semi-liquid material. Every single element of every work is premeditated, every painting planned to the last detail.

Careful my dear chap. You're telling us so much actual informative-type information, you'll end up not being an art critic at all.

There is a fascinating room of Riley's studies here. However methodical and cold-blooded they are, they are often great drawings – precisely because they have no self-regard or affectation of style.

More like it, but still vaguely informative.

A consistent feature of her works is their disinterestedness.

"Disinterestedness." Better. In normal art critical circumstances this would mean nothing at all.

There's no pawing about of the surface, no expression, no reworking, no accidents.

Okay, but now actual sense and actual information is being circled around and arrived at again, from the great sky of nonsense that is modern art criticism of the usual sort.

In fact, the paintings themselves can barely be said to have any painterly touch at all.

Normally this would do. But here, it verges on the lucid.

I ask myself, as an aside, why it is that while people complain about art being made or fabricated by others, as though the artist were somehow cheating, no one ever levels this accusation at Riley?

Now this is the kind of thing you should avoid at all costs, and calling it an aside is no excuse whatever. Your job is to talk about the incomprehensibly idiotic reactions of your idiotically incomprehensible self. Don't recycle the lucid observations of the general public. Big mistake. Your core readership likes modern art and accordingly opposes sensibleness whenever and wherever it rears its beautiful head. Piss off your regular lunatics and who else will read your stuff? Who on earth wants to read sensible writing about modern art day after day, when there's so much sensible stuff out there already, about sensible things?

You writing something that I accidentally encountered, liked and learned from isn't going to make me want to read you every day, for goodness sake. I'm sensible too.

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Ho ho. Anyway, setting aside the rights and wrongs of being a decent, proper, gibberish modern art critic such as we've all come to expect and despise, I now want to talk about Bridget Riley and how she does things.

I've spent the last month or two, in among doing things that I actually know how to do, trying to understand HTML, web design, blog design etc. (Not that you'd know it from looking at this, blah blah, usual apology for how this looks, usual claim that things will improve Real Soon Now.) And the way Riley goes about her business is that she's doing something which will eventually, like HTML now, be doable by machine. Go back to that bit about …

… diagrams and colour swatch tests, in which every colour relationship is fine-tuned in terms of its hue-value, saturation, its place on the tonal scale, as well as in terms of its opacity, its flow, its gloss or mattness, its maleability as a semi-liquid material …

All those exact numbers that denote exact colours – now where have we all seen that before? That's right, in those numbers that go something like 33FF33 (pardon me if that's an impossible colour – I'm not yet on top of this stuff) that are buried in among the coding of web pages.

This woman isn't just a painter; she's a painting "programmer" and has been for forty years, in much the same way that I was a desktop publisher before computers could do that. (For me, phrases like "cut and paste" used once to mean … cut and paste.)

Eventually, Riley, or her technical great-grandchildren, will be able to type her graphics programmes into a computer, push a button (like the one you push on a programme Patrick Crozier has been showing me called "Textpad") which immediately shows you what you've done.

To some extent, you can do this with Riley paintings now, as my link to Riley pictures above illustrates. You don't get the full effect, if only because computers screens are now mostly too small. But the mathematics-friendly aspect of her work and its lack of "painterly" quality, as Searle calls it, means that already it cries out to be computerised.

And as Searle notes, we would no more accuse Bridget Riley of being an idle, skiving, modern art layabout than bloggers would accuse Sekimori of not doing anything merely because she doesn't hand paint your blog for you. Sekimori and Bridget Riley are both in the business of creating not images, but instructions for images. (The normal skiving modern artist now just says "bung a fish in a tank would you lads", which of course is cheating.)

*

Well, that's a blog posting. But I don't want to leave it there, because one of the variables which Searle notes that Riley specifies shows just how far we have to go before we can flick a switch and see paintings on computer screens, and I mean really see them. This is the respect in which Riley's stuff can't yet be seen in all its splendour in our kitchens and living rooms.

I don't know exactly how "maleability as a semi-liquid material" works. I mean, is the painting supposed to remain sticky for ever? Surely not. I suppose that degree of stickiness while it's being applied somehow affects how it ends up looking.

But that matt/gloss thing I do understand. I used to do Airfix kits of airplanes, and I was pretty good at it. That I know about. And just imagine how far computer screens have to go before they can recreate shininess, or not shininess, to order: a coloured surface that either does behave quite a lot like a mirror, or doesn't behave at all like a mirror, or any specified combination of the two. As I understand computer screens, that decision is now made just the once, by the people who design the screen. There's no way they can let Bridget Riley or for that matter Sekimori loose on the screen to decide different degrees of mattness or glossiness for different specified bits of it.

And just to be clear about this anmd to answer one possible objection right now, the way you make things look shiny on a computer screen now is have them reflect particular things you decide about, in the picture. I'm talking about a computer screen which will reflect or not reflect, with controllable variability, the actual things in front of it.

Question for paintings buffs. Is this matt/gloss variability an important issue for paintings generally? Does the effective recreation on a computer screen of a Titian or a Constable or a Turner or Monet or a Picasso need, if it is to be truly effective, a matt/gloss capability? I rather think it does.

And if computer screens can't yet do such a thing, are computer printers any better. My understanding is that computer printers, just like computer screens, have their matt/gloss setting preordained for the entire surface, and as much by the paper as by the printer itself.

And of course once you get into oil painting of the relatively recent vintage, it would help if you could also give the surface of the screen that is trying to recreate it a three-D capability. Oil paintings of the more exuberant sort have for centuries been like those relief maps in expensive Atlases, where the mountains stick up towards you. Good luck to the nerds trying to make that happen on a computer screen.

I should reckon that old-fashioned printers, but working in colour, can just about do all this stuff, if they are at the very top of their game and working for money-no-object customers. But computer printers of the "affordeable" sort, no, and computer screens, not for decades. I recall expressing here, some while ago, optimism about how near we are to art-for-all – all-art-for-all at the flick of a switch – courtesy of Bill Gates and his minions. Yet the truth is that current computer screens hardly scratch the surface (ho ho) of all the problems involved.

And just as the painters, in order to stay busy, responded to photography by doing stuff that the photographers couldn't do (like paintings that weren't of anything, and paintings that were of things, but which were also very "painted", if you get my drift), so too, as soon as the nerds crack how to make a Constable on a computer screen that you really can't tell from the original (apart from it being in better condition), the artists will devise things that the nerds can't fake up with their machines. Indeed, are not "installations" the artists seeing this moment on its way, and them taking their usual precautionary evasive action?

That's enough for today. Long piece, and probably several typos and muddles. But I don't have time to do any more cleaning up. The problem is that each time I go through this, I find more things I want to say, and it gets even more muddled. So, enough.