Painters have nervously vied with photographers ever since Daguerre announced his invention to the world in 1839. Smug representatives of the avant-garde from each medium have at various times declared the other one crass or elitist or monocular or dead. A succession of art movements, from Impressionism to Pop, can be defined by their rejection or adoption of the latest picture-making gizmos.
Several New York shows in the past six months indicate that painting and photography remain locked in an uneasy, co-dependent relationship but have also learned to feed off each other in the digital era as never before. New possibilities for mutating images in Photoshop and other programs have energized artists young and old. In some blurry cases, it's no longer clear what is a painting and what is a photograph...
Some sort of parity or truce may now be in order. It is hard to say in Mr. Richter's "Strip Paintings" which element in their genesis is dominant, whereas in Mr. Leslie's show, his hand—brush-wielding or mouse-moving—holds the cards. Even if a computer-savvy artist such as Mr. Guyton isn't mourning the loss of painting, his work aspires to its scale and decorative élan. The tension between media has not vanished. All images in the digital age seem to exist in a kind of soup that anyone is free to sample. But the identities and sources of the ingredients are still essential if art is going to retain any flavor.
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