And (Yawn) Painting is Hot Again...

Because Blake Gopnik firmly believes that painting is dead, he is going to hate this, but like it happens every few years, all the critical voices are aligning again to say: "sorry, we were wrong and painting is not dead... so sorry."

Tap, tap... Critical alignment happening here... Watch for art critics and curators who have dismissed painting over the last few years now try to re-invent themselves and desperately try to catch up. And art mogul Saatchi has already publicly chastised Blake Gopnik for having such a traditional and outdated view of painting's death.

This Telegraph article discusses that:

To suggest that painting has triumphed over other media would require a rather outdated notion of hierarchy. But it is certainly receiving a flurry of attention. The art periodicals Contemporary Art, Flash Art and Modern Painters all broke with regular practice and ran large special issues on it last year. Remarkably, it was Modern Painters' first ever issue devoted exclusively to painting.

Even painters themselves, who won't admit that painting ever went away, agree that it is back in focus. "There are always artists making interesting paintings – sometimes they attract little attention, sometimes, as now, a lot," wrote Michael Craig Martin in the New Statesman this month.

"There's certainly a lot of talk about painting being back," says Pablo Lafuente, curator of a much smaller painting show than Saatchi's now on at London's Haunch of Venison gallery. "It suffered a lot during the 1990s, but in the last few years it's been changing: there's a buzz in both the market and museum worlds. Before, painters used to explain that they also worked in other media. Now, there's an unapologetic-ness."

Read the whole article here.