Michael Fried in an essay called Art And Objecthood trenchantly criticised the minimalist art of the time. His main concern was what he saw as the art world’s slide into theatricality theatricality. By this he meant the inclusion of the viewers experience of viewing an artwork into the meaning of the artwork itself – the explicit acknowledgment of the role and presence of the viewer (or beholder), and the shift in emphasis away from the intentions of the creator. Fried championed art (mostly Modernist and Abstract) which effectively ignored the role of the beholder, was complete in and of itself, and which functioned as a direct vehicle for the aesthetic concerns of the artist.

His art history book Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot Fried argued that the same concerns to be at the heart of developments in 18th century French painting. In particular, the anti-theatrical tradition sought to produce art which denied the presence of a beholder by producing work that portrayed people in states of absorption

The figure is immersed in their own world and activities and display no awareness of the construct of the picture and the necessary presence of the viewer. Absorption as a recurrent motif throughout Wall’s work: – often his pictures depict people engrossed in some activity, apparently completely oblivious to the presence of either the photographer, or the eventual beholder.

In Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein, and the Everyday Michael Fried says that:

One of the most important developments in the so-called visual arts of the past twenty-five years has been the emergence of large-scale, tableau-sized photographs that by virtue of their size demand to be hung on gallery walls in the manner of easel paintings and, in other respects as well, aspire to what might loosely be called the rhetorical or beholder-addressing significance of paintings while at the same time declaring their artifactual identity as photographs.

What is the significance of the absorption mode? Wall is not much help as his insistence is on the primacy of aesthetic concerns in the form of of notions of beauty, pleasure, and quality (he cites Kant and Greenberg in support of his views), while at the same time calling attention to the congruence between such concerns and an art of the everyday ( eg., cleaning,washing or housework.)

Fried endeavors to tie this to Wittgenstein's “sub specie æternitatis" view from outside that is, from the standpoint of eternity in contrast to the usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them Wittgenstein held that the work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.

Is Fried arguing that the aesthetic gaze is a “sub specie æternitatis" perspective--one leaves behind all one's personal circumstances and particular interests? The implication is that the disinterested perspective of the Stoic is the happy perspective.