The resurgent interest in contemporary painting in recent years has coincided with an explosion of new digital media and technologies. Contrary to canonical accounts premised on medium specificity, painting's most advanced positions since the 1960s have developed in productive friction with contemporaneous forms of mass media and culture. From the rise of television and computer technology to the Internet revolution, painting has assimilated precisely those cultural and technological developments that were held responsible for its presumed "death" or marginalization in the face of Conceptual art.
"Painting 2.0 : Expression in the Information Age" is the first exhibition to tell the story of painting's adaptation, absorption, and transformation of information technologies in Western Europe and the United States since the 1960s. This book includes three extended curatorial essays, considering the historical, formal, and theoretical questions of the exhibition's three central themes— "Gesture and Spectacle," "Eccentric Figuration, and "Social Networks"—as well as six statements by significant voices in the history and theory of painting.
