When you google the wunderkind painter Anna Weyant, the suggested searches are as follows: “Anna Weyant Larry Gagosian relationship” (referring to her dalliance with the now eighty-year-old world-famous art dealer and gallerist her detractors say launched her career); “Anna Weyant Jason Isbell” (the more age-appropriate singer she’s moved on with); “Anna Weyant age” (only thirty); “Anna Weyant net worth” (somewhere in the millions, it’s speculated); “Anna Weyant art for sale” (certainly unaffordable and unavailable). It’s notable that when I looked her up, it wasn’t until the fourth or fifth suggestion that art was included. The flurry around Weyant has become less about her paintings and more about her.

It’s rare for a contemporary painter to get enough attention to garner online gossip, but Weyant stands out as an anomaly with an outsized place in the public imagination. Not only is she the youngest artist to be represented by Gagosian, the mega gallery owned by Weyant’s former beau, but her paintings have sold for millions of dollars at auction. (While Weyant grew up in Calgary, she’s never had a commercial gallery show on home soil. Instead, with a hop, skip, and a jump, she landed in the biggest art markets in the world in New York City.) On Reddit, posts about Weyant usually invoke mixed feelings: either “right place, right time” or “her art wouldn’t be selling for millions if she wasn’t sleeping with Gagosian.” People don’t know how to feel about the artist. There’s a tinge of misogyny to all of this discourse—sometimes overtly and other times more insidiously.

Weyant has been part of a recent shift in the art world to figurative, representational painting—which aligns with the rise of identity-based art that gained prominence at the turn of the twenty-first century. Artists like Jennifer Packer, Jordan Casteel, Salman Toor, and Jenna Gribbon paint their everyday lives, capturing intimate scenes of their friends and lovers. This marks a return to the realist paintings of the nineteenth century—think Gustave Courbet and Jules Breton—combined with some conceptual strategies borrowed from postmodernism, like self-reflexivity and identity politics.

It’s a style also informed by Instagram: just as the app’s algorithm rewards images of people and faces, paintings of these subjects also tend to do well. Instagram has upended the way the art world operates, accelerating the speed at which an artist’s career can grow and allowing artists to gain visibility. It’s also changed the content of the work itself: images must be flattened from a living, breathing piece of art into a collection of pixels to ensure they look good in the tiny real estate of a grid.

In the past few years, I have noticed a new talking point in the art world. For the first........

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