The diverse styles of older living painters such as David Hockney, Gerhard Richter, Robert Rauschenberg and Alex Katz stand testament to painting's constant search for innovation during a period when it was still felt to be under threat. The younger generation, freer of such worries, are producing myriad solutions to the problem. One critic has even described it as a new age of "mannerism": as in the 16th century, painters are thinking of every way they can to distort and subvert the rules of representation that went before.