A Powerful Collector Changes Course | Alan Riding
http://tinyurl.com/47os6
“In an article last weekend in The Sunday Telegraph of London, Andrew Graham-Dixon conceded that Mr. Saatchi could genuinely believe painting is now central to contemporary art. ‘It is also possible that, like a cannily contrarian fund-manager working in the equities market, he has simply decided that painting is currently an undervalued sector – and he has bet his portfolio on the proposition that it has a big recovery upside,’ Mr. Graham-Dixon wrote.”

Some thoughts on the future of painting | Timothy Comeau
http://tinyurl.com/6aq7k
“As a 20th Century fashion, we can assume that in the future historians will be able to date our paintings by this look, just as easily as we can with past centuries. We know that the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries have style, a theme of subject matter, a look. In the 20th Century, painting became obsessed with itself as a viscous medium resting on a surface. We don’t know what 21st Century painting will look like – this century’s look has not yet developed. It seems that in a world where all of our images are perfectly rendered on screens, the human touch evident in brushstroke and viscosity is what makes painting valuable. It occurs to me then that perhaps the traditional tales of the rise of Modernism, and especially Ab-ex painting in the 1950s, ignores the concurrent development of television. These things make me think that this style has legs to go into the 21st Century. At the same time, we 20C folk are limited to thinking of everything as ‘human touch’ and go on and on about ‘humanity’ – this vast 19th C hangover of industrialization