There's no general public, there's no one culture, and among smaller groups of people, things like black and white go in and out of style but rarely die.
The people that I show work to (largely dealers and institutions in the new york area) look at black and white work but at the moment see it as kind of retro. Most of the big statements being made in photo in the high art world are in color, so black and white images are less likely to be seen as about Right Now. but this is only a generalization.
I know of at least a couple of major collectors who won't touch color. It's not their esthetic.
The commercial worlds are even more driven by fads than the art worlds. If something's dead at the moment, just wait around a little while. It will be back. My sense is in the commercial world, black and white is still popular as a particular "look," especially when people want a sense of nostalgia. It's annoying that a great medium gets pigeon-holed like this, but commercial art has never been about depth, so it's understandable.
Just don't expect work that looks like early 20th Century black and white formal modernism to ever look fresh again. It won't. The world is used to it. If elements of it come back into fashion, they will do so with a nostalgic, retro vibe. You can never get back the sense of revolution and upheaval that the work carried when it was new.
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