The invention of photography was supposed to bring about the death of painting.
What actually happened, however, was that photography became a parasite, feeding off painting. It is enriched by it, bolstered and buoyed by its conventions — such as the use of landscape or portrait formats, cropping, choice of subject and any number of other things. In his self-titled show, currently running at The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Andreas Gursky makes photography almost seem like it is jealous of painting.
In "Untitled VI" (1997), a conventionally high modernist title derived from painting's provenance, Gursky photographs Jackson Pollock's epically huge drip painting "Number 31" in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Apparently conceived as a "portrait" — a conception that flips around the horizontal landscape-type orientation of the actual painting — the photographed painting also seems small, with photography bigger. It looks like painting envy.