Painting in the light of digital reproduction

"The proliferation of digital photographs on the Internet is incomprehensibly vast. These images owe much to the categories and styles of traditional photography, yet often it is their unmediated low quality, in terms of selection, composition, and compression, which is particularly elevated to prominence by the new medium. The Internet represents a near infinite expansion of the mail-order catalogue, amateur snapshot or analogue video; a way of collecting visual information where the aesthetics of simple functionality or mediocrity is observed, as there is virtually no material cost involved. Photographers, filmmakers and painters have already trawled the found-image archive extensively. Gerhard Richter's encyclopaedic Atlas project or the photographic collections of Fischli and Weiss are clear examples of the artistic imperative to gather, filter and categorise pictures. Trying to develop taxonomies of images is like assembling a Thesaurus, where it is possible to cross-reference through every definition. Now it would seem that found images are all we have thanks to the Internet's primary function as consumer and diffuser of information, a generator of simulacra. Paradoxically, this infinite source seems to have more veracity due