Perhaps the decline of interest in still, Fine Art painting was inevitable right after Joseph Niepce' invented the chemical goop that made possible the first photograph in 1827. By the way, that first photograph was a rather uninteresting composition, coming, as it did, from an ex-artillery officer who had chemistry only as his hobby. 
First Photograph of rooftops by Joseph Niepce 1927
The artists of the day engaged with photography a few decades later when portraits were all the rage in Paris. Paris, at the time, was the Capital of Fine Art for the world. The Art students of the 1860's especially, unhappily noted that a mechanism could render accurately after just a sitting of a minute or two.
Further and even more unhappily, the photographic images had far, far better resolution and accuracy than the Art students could manually achieve in hours or days of toil on their studio easels. They took it so badly that in the early 1870's subjects and objects of paintings themselves changed radically from airy notions such as "Beauty Sleeps with Worship" to landscapes painted loosely to dramatize the effects of light and space.
As a matter of fact, a case could be made that almost all paintings done before photography took hold were the best attempts at photography that the hand could create. They were tapestries and then paintings meant to capture and send forward into time things like battles won, the faces and figures of lords and ladies, landscapes, architecture, religious ideas; everything, in short, that television, cinema and the internet does today.
Fairly soon after still-image photography came moving images projected onto a lighted screen. Of course that revolutionized everything even though the full effects of the movies wouldn't become a cultural tidal wave until the 1940's.
In the late 1980's computers hit the shore with an upgrade from emulsion film's 24 to a digital 30 "frames" per second. Additionally came animations and, even more importantly, special effects that were so "real" as to be totally imperceptible to a viewing audience.
Hence, reality could be "remade" as it were, far more easily than it could be remade with film. And if these technologies, themselves, weren't enough to kill off still paintings and prints, a pre-occupation with celebrity has recently swept the entire world.
Now any mention of "The Arts" means primarily, some sort of performance... (at this moment in time, one of the best-selling interactive games is something called Guitar Hero) Frighteningly, large, lighted roadside signs can tell 10-30 second stories while you are driving by. Granted that, at the moment, these are almost always advertisements exhorting us to purchase well beyond our means. However, there's nothing to prevent pure moving Art or, more darkly, propaganda from hitting the lighted screens to be.
Even now, television screens have grown to stadium size proportions and very, very soon, within a decade or less, lighted screens will be commonplace along the walls of many homes and offices.
Of course, all of those screens will require moving pictures, not still ones. At least, that's the way I see it; sadly, soon, no more paintings on the wall...
