Gerhard Richter's oeuvre shows that while painting changes, it never dies

There are too many prizes. Culture is not an awards ceremony. Real art makes its bones in the real world, far from the rarefied and false atmosphere of a jury. Who cares if Sophocles won prizes? And yet the art awards keep on coming: soon, this year's Threadneedle prize and Jerwood drawing prize will kick into action.

Both are fighting what some might see as a rearguard action, promoting painting and sculpture (in the case of the Threadneedle) and draughtsmanship (in the case of the Jerwood) at a time when photography and video are seemingly the ascendant media in the visual arts.

The recent death of Lucian Freud raised a question that he kept at bay in his lifetime. Is painting finished? Are the visual arts, as they were practised down the centuries, all over, replaced for ever by installations and digital images?

One thing is certain: if that were the case, no prize, no award would hold back the flood. An art prize cannot reverse time. The great pressures and forces that change art – and society – are not fashions. They go far deeper. There were serious, real reasons for a generation that came of age in the late 1980s to make art with videotape. Consider the young Douglas Gordon, who – watching Psycho on television – wondered what it would look like slowed down. The monumental artwork that resulted did not find fans through the supposed manipulators of art fashion, sitting in high jury to decide what was in or out for the 1990s, but because it had originality, authority and power.

Meanwhile, Freud was painting great works in the 1990s. But was he the only good painter, and was his the only viable approach to painting? The answer to both questions is no. Just when you thought painting was dead, the range and richness of it will shortly be celebrated at Tate Modern in its exhibition of Gerhard Richter. Even as a portraitist, Richter is Freud's equal. And he does so much else besides: he paints landscapes, abstractions, histories. Where Freud can be seen as a painter who resisted photography, Richter is a painter who embraces the photograph. In this, he is scarcely novel. His ease with the photographic age echoes 19th-century artists such as Degas and Manet – artists he resembles in other ways, too, as an ironic observer of the modern scene.

Let's drop the parochial media mourning. Freud was not the only important painter of our time. Richter is actually the greater artist, I suspect – and his works appear more inspiring for younger painters, and photographers.

One thing is certain: a Richter does not need a prize, and certainly not a bathos-steeped, let's-help-the-poor-old-painters prize, to assert his virtues. His art easily straddles painting, photography, realism and conceptualism. In this, he is the heir of the great modern artists. Painting will never die. It just changes its nature, all the time.