Surreal deal 5

Did European Modernist Painting ever recover from Nazi persecution of it as 'Degenerate', pre-War, post War, and Cold War and post-Cold War? Did it get subjected to totalitarian Stalinist 'Socialist Realism’ denounced as 'western bourgeois counter-revolutionary narcissism’ that remains partly dormant right up to today, camouflaged by contemporary AI, gaming, social media and high tech? Why has it taken the 3rd decade of the 21st century to rattle a few heads together to embark on the de-stigmatizing of it? And who but TATT has tried to prevent its reemergence by pulling rank? There have been fleeting glimpses of it as 'magic realism' in the 1980 and 1990s, or it has been hacked, trolled, subjected to fake news and a hand me down from Sci Fi as 'fantasy Art'!

The 20th century is nuts and it can be satirised, parodied even made into a pastiche or laden with irony, or do we still hold-on to a 'Post Communist post ideological post-Cold War delusion? Or can we admit that we live under the fear of charismatic authoritarian nationalism and pan nationalism in multiple corners of the first world?

We do not live in a sanitized Anthropocene zoo of Art variants as an aesthetic conceptual and AI crop rotation, but philosophical debate has been replaced by AI, social media, digitalised Tech Art with a short shelf life and immediate turn-over for the next generation, newest gadget of Art - Gaming?

An underclass (the Painting medium) has withstood such intimidation...