Blog ten

So, have low grade pre 1945 modernist Painters been purchased instead of new contemporary Painting just to control today's market as well as confine any new modernist work deprived of moving the nearly 300-year-old, 3 stage versions of modernism by Paint decades? What is it with the Art establishment?!! Do they just recognise Modernist Painting (in any era) but only in the past? Do Painters have to wait until they die before they are recognised? But what if we have to wait until a new political class of the same authoritarian stock re-hash (and in today's case) Nationalism now that Marxism has failed? Indeed, shouldn't we have been quicker on the uptake about charismatic authoritarianism of a blend of deference to pan nationalism whilst harbouring nationalism of its own? ...well? That's right, the Oligarchs have it! We should have been aware that the ex-Marxist Leninist regime of Russian capitalism was buying up all the pre-1945 Russian Modernist Art en bloc!!! That should have led us to perceive that nationalism by buying abroad to facilitate Russian nationalism at home! Nationalism and Soviet China has been radically Capitalising itself, not by abandoning Marxism, but by viralling-in it, where every Chinese has to do her or his duty to make profit and excel at new taxable new revenue streams globally even in America's backyard!??!! Perhaps they may see it as an upgrade (temporary or not) to a tenuous Marxist 19th century 'philosophy' rather than a 'historical scientific inevitability' as was its conviction hitherto! Was it an amendment or a departure, or a failing?

Whilst TATT say Painting has reached its creative limits, they still won't concede that modernism is different today because Painting today could evaporate borders and dissolve barriers and frontier spirit of yesterday as today's reality check!! Just as it is to the new tech of today and the new audience of Painting inspired not governed by tech as just one new element of a subject matter agenda that has transitioned from old to new thinking. Even on a newly drawn geo political map, there are new possibilities like the new ideological transition to Nationalism, Climate change, Trump, Tariffs, war in Europe and the Middle-East, overkill of tech and AI, hacking, fake news, trolls, social media, imperialism and counter-imperialism etc are all about breaking down post 20th century post-Cold War thinking, and to capture all of it is beyond script but possible visually from the palms of our hands! ! ! These are new unsettling realities of this week even...who knows what's going to happen tomorrow, let alone next week!!???? Physical boundaries of the canvas just invite us to paint the next one, an endless incentive, a stimulation to capture all we can constantly in movement, mobile and flexible etc!! Now whilst tech Art replaces itself as a constant reminder of old tech versus new Tech, the medium of Paint isn't subjected to those constraints!!! We are tech proof!

Tech Art or Conceptual Art becomes stale and stagnates intertest, whereas visual Paint incorporates the whole spectrum of humanities needing to use their hands and eyes to inform what they are thinking and how they define culture. Painters hold interest from 'holding hands' to a cave wall and spitting paint to make a silhouette of that hand - hands-on hand prints were never just replication only, but their ancient canvas was a cave to produce metaphor for all spiritual and tribal values as far back as 40 to 70 thousand years ago!!! But never has tech been so ground shifting than the last 35 years since the end of the Cold War, than today, and yet we want to abandon the visual and the metaphor on the never ending canvas by human endeavour by fixation on mortality and finality that all societies have already put into perspective as part of life being lived fully??!!

We aren't a rolling stone, but we are the people who keep turning over the stone to witness all the insects and detritus of our environment and how we fit into today! We are inventors, both progressive and regressive, we have a self-destructive instinct in every version of Modernist Painting, and our 21st century one is no different! But we have a unique series of skill sets in which we remind people of the over influence of New York, LA, Moscow and St Petersburg as where Art houses and Art business markets thrive, and yet value our own imperfection as our true human visual resource that is entirely terrestrial, even if it remains a cyclical re-birth and inevitable implosion! We remain a temporal democratising influence on ourselves and the world around us as we unflinchingly embrace it yet recognise that we will be undermined by our own hubris, lying dormant ready to emerge in a volcanic eruption, or a genuine smooth transition, but we will screw it up and screw it on at the same time! That's modernist Painting's job, let us get on with it!