The conference illustrated in this publication was accompanied by the exhibition ‘The Blind Spots of Modelling,’ in which models and modelling methods from energy technology were juxtaposed with visual art on modelling by Tobias Becker, the author of this article. In this contribution, I cite three sample works from the exhibition with regard to some significant blind spots of modelling identified there, and negotiate them under completely different auspices. As the artistic model is not obliged to be as objective or applicable as a scientific one, it follows its own laws, which enables the ambivalent appearance of the model between existence and non-existence, between antetype and copy, and, above all, reconfigures its inherent fallibility in a media- and self-reflexive way. In this sense, my works are representative of a widespread and lively model culture in the visual arts, in which the characteristics of the model are made productively usable in the most diverse ways. The detailed descriptions of the selected works are preceded by a look at the genesis of the model in the visual arts. The model as an independent medium entered art in the 1970s in the course of a persistent questioning of traditional artistic media, and has since produced a variety of model languages which are briefly outlined in this article along the lines of doubt and critique, proposition and play with some of their most prominent representatives.