Being a painter is tough these days, writes Blake Gopnik. “There will always be talented artists who can overcome the difficulties that painting faces. In fact, with the odds so stacked against them, the handful of truly good paintings that get turned out look that much more impressive. I’ll bet that somehow, somewhere, someday — in a decade, a century, could be a millennium or two — a whole new kind of painted work will come along to breathe new life into the medium. Painting has dead-ended before, and each time a Titian or a Monet, a Picasso or a Pollock has hit on a way out that no critic could have guessed at in advance. Any critic who insists that can never happen again is asking to eat crow.”