Mark Stone questions the future of painting as our connection to nature and the direct experience of the physical world yields to technology, social media, and the 24 hour news cycle:

"… because visual painting can no longer be engaged outside the mediated experience, what we are given instead are “painted” objects, things to encounter, things to purchase, stockpile and trade, in the moment that we look up from our screens… The "painted" object finds its meaning not in its being, not as it's revealed, or in its experience, but as it's re-presented, contextualized through other media. This third generation of Postmodern Neo-Abstraction, can and does, reproduce painting-like products without addressing first person visual involvement with originality, talent, quality, beauty, ugliness, specificity, thought, critique or irony."