For a long time, most painting consisted of portrayals of people and physical objects. Then came photography and film, and these made such things mostly obsolete. So a lot of the painting that is done now is of mind states and feelings, which cannot be portrayed by photography and which can only be portrayed through painting.
One question that is often asked is, Why doesn’t anyone paint normally any more? The response is that normal painting has been displaced by photography and film. It takes a lot less money and time to take a photograph than to make a painting. So painting had to go into another direction in order to remain viable.
My former partner Julia was a painter and a fine art photographer. Her photographs did not only portray the things of the world; they portrayed feelings and ideas. She could take peeled paint on a door and turn it into a work of art. She told me that she strove in her work for beauty whereas many other artists only strove for weirdness.
One question that a conservative classmate of mine, in talking about NEA-funded art, asked is, “What is art?” This question needs to be asked of a lot of people. I do not see “Piss Christ” as a work of art at all. But there is a lot of contemporary painting that really is a work of art, just not the kind of a work of art to which people are used.
Photography has displaced realistic painting; so artists needed to paint something else. Some of them produced good art and some did not. Many contemporary styles I have seen in realistic painting are modelled after impressionism, which cannot be replaced by photography. Why don’t artists paint normally any more? Because they have been taken over by technology. And I do not expect this to change anytime soon.