Is Everything Liminal Now?

In recent years, the popular meaning of the word “liminal” has expanded to include more of the not-quite-right and not-quite-there. Consider the following pieces and then discuss with your team: is it fair to describe them as liminal works? Or are we using the term liminal too loosely?

Paul Gauguin | Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98)
Rene Magritte | The Treachery of Images (1929)
Salvador Dali | The Persistence of Memory (1931)
Andrew Wyeth | Christina’s World (1948)
M. C. Escher | Ascending and Descending (1960)
Gregory Crewdson | Beneath the Roses (2004)
Camille Seamn | The Distant is Imminent (2020)

Key concepts

Semantic Drift: What happens when a technical word escapes its field: it broadens, softens, and starts naming a feeling rather than a process. 'Trauma', 'quantum' and 'literally' all went this way. Drift is not a mistake, it is how English works — but the precise sense and the popular one stop being the same tool.

Every work — at a glance

Where Do We Come from? What Are We? Where Are We Going? — Paul Gauguin (painting)

Gauguin's vast blue canvas, painted in Tahiti in 1897 while he was destitute, ill and grieving his daughter, and meant as a final testament. It reads right to left: a sleeping infant, then figures in the fullness of life reaching for fruit, then an old woman crouched with her head in her hands. He painted the questions straight onto the canvas.

+ 6 more works explained inside

What to know

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Is it fair to call these liminal works? The anthropologists' sense sets two conditions: the state is temporary, and you come out of it changed. Gauguin's right-to-left march from cradle to grave meets both, and so does Christina, caught mid-crossing in a journey that will cost her everything to finish. Escher's staircase meets neither — nothing is transforming, it is a closed loop — so calling it liminal is already the looser sense at work.

+ 1 more insight inside

Across subjects

Borges wrote the same joke in one paragraph. In 'On Exactitude in Science', an empire's cartographers make a map so accurate it reaches the size of the empire

Theme connection

"Are We There Yet?"

The fear here is not of travel but of being caught mid-transition. Is the word's expansion a loss of precision or a real discovery? The technical sense is narrow. The internet's version — a hallway at 3 a.m., a hotel pool with no swimmers — is vaguer, and it named a feeling millions already had.

Practice — a sample

ARTSomeone who believes 'liminal' should mean a true threshold is LEAST likely to include —

A An airport gate
B A doorway
C A melting-clock dreamscape
D A hallway
E A clinic waiting room

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