Amy Sillman and her gallery raised the "painting is dead" argument in the press release for her current show (not sure why--a couple of AFC commenters think it's so she could be seen as refuting it). A Time Out New York review by Howard Halle considered whether "painting is dead" is itself dead:
...It would be fairer to describe painting-is-dead as a persistent if vestigial meme, vastly diminished from its Conceptual Art heyday, when Tricky Dick was compiling enemies lists and planning break-ins, but still a notion to be reckoned with.
Not that anyone had ever stopped painting in the first place, of course, but let’s face it: Beyond what transpired in the ’60s and ’70s, some important milestones in 20th-century art stem from similar repudiations of the craft—notably Marcel Duchamp’s dismissal of painting as being merely “retinal,” and Walter Benjamin’s association of it with reactionary politics. I’d submit that a lot of curators, dealers and collectors today must agree with such characterizations on a certain level; otherwise, why would so many biennials and art fairs be stuffed with video, installation and found/fabricated objects?
So if painting-is-dead isn’t the 800-pound gorilla it used to be, it remains, arguably, a more elusive Yeti loping among the art-world’s high-cultural Himalayas.
This assessment is good, if arguably not necessary, if the reasons for invoking "painting-is-dead" are spurious. If discuss it we must, Halle's account omits some points, so here is how it could be rewritten:
Painting-is-dead is a persistent but by no means vestigial meme, having morphed from its Conceptual Art heyday to a set of working conditions beyond the artworld's ability to frame: to wit, the culture of "cyber-everything" seducing viewers and practitioners away from the creaky rituals of stretching, daubing, and displaying pigment on canvas.
Beyond what transpired in the '60s and '70s, some important milestones in 20th- and 21st-century art stem from repudiations of the craft—-notably Marcel Duchamp’s dismissal of painting as being merely 'retinal,' Walter Benjamin’s association of it with reactionary politics, and the critique from video art and new media that painting avoids more pressing problems of the dominant techno-culture.
I’d submit that a lot of curators, dealers and collectors today must agree with such characterizations on a certain level; otherwise, why would so many biennials and art fairs be stuffed with video, installation and interactive web art? Painting-is-dead is still an 800-pound gorilla, which is why painters continually have to assert their 'primacy' in press releases.