Paul Corio argues that the way forward for painting is to engage more meaningfully with its history.

Corio writes: "I know people having been writing about the death of the avant-garde for more than fifty years, but I mean it this time – it's exhausted, and this is not a tragedy; the vast majority of the world's great masterpieces have been made outside of this model. The avant-garde had a good run – more than a century – and was certainly responsible for some high-water marks, but that's over now." He continues: "So now that the avant garde is genuinely dead, what do we replace it with? Or more specifically, how do we replace its motives, so familiar and reflexive, taught at all the big schools and showed at the big institutions? I think a meaningful engagement with history is an excellent starting point…"