Painting?

Will painting ever be rendered "obsolete?" Or is the staying power of painting secured precisely because it distanced itself from "its supposed tradition?" A couple of readings back, a question was posted about whether Duchamp was trying to rescue or destroy art. As more information becomes available to us about Duchamp's work, is it safer to say that maybe he was trying to do both?

In Painting? A State of Utter Idiocy, Reijnders suggests the idea that Duchamp (and Warhol and the others) simply destroyed painting in order to rescue it. He claims that "the renunciation of painting has, however paradoxical this may seem, merely increased its freedom of movement." From the Photography reading, we learned that because photographs were so realistic, it freed painting from our desires to depict something realistically.