The Art world fails its basic brief, that it hides in sophistry, if its reductive modus operandi only countenances 'non-Painting Art'. An anti-inclusion, disintegrative elitist cultural practice can still not hold out against the primal suspense, drama and brutality of our ancestral home of 'Carbon Paint Art' !
So when the police can't prosecute because of entrapment laws it is the police themselves who get punished by internal disciplinary action for 'something they didn't do !' Likewise my generation has punished Painting not by Painting punishment issues, but by reckless omission from the top table of Art. Furthermore, it has tried to make the medium of Painting 'obsolete and culturally inadequate to explain the narrative of post cold war social change. This is an act of aesthetic decapitation to disengage form by misappropriation of angst, existential relativism deconstruction and its ambivalent relationship with Nietzsche, especially his deterministic 'eternal return'. You would have thought that Marxist inevitability was quite sufficient to self-inflict, so why opt for another determinist that sanctions extremism?
The 'eternal return' had become a closed loop rather than a Marxist objective under specific socio-economic conditions - the 'sorry you don't qualify' but thanks for trying' elitism legitimised every failure in the Marxist book and Nietzsche would have loved nothing better but to watch from his front row seat again and again and again...how Marxism kept making excuses for its dysfunctional oppressive nature and inevitable destiny to (like today's Russia) become the Capitalist imperialist anti-social expansionist hacker today !!
But this repetition for eternity may well have explained the formal boundaries of Nietzsche but not necessarily the formal boundaries of Painting. How? What? Abstract and figurative Painting was already established by the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, so why depend on formal principles for another 85 years vis a vis Painting and then replace them with the collision or fusion of 'everything but Paint'? Is the 'eternal return' only part way through its annual or ten year loop? Or is the eternal return indeed never repeated because it expands with possibilities at the same time as the expansion of the Universe or Parallel Universes? Or was the eternal return just another reincarnation of Nietzsche's personal and societal limitations? Just an escape? A release ? His own imaginary world that he could manipulate? Like 'Form' as an argument to enslave Painting, why repeat again and again how Paint stifles the imagination when 'Conceptual Art'(that advanced Art non-military techniques and technologies that replaced Painting as Painting was seen as formally derivative) was itself derivative from the later stages of 1918, by Marcel Duchamp's latrine turned upside down. Indeed, did 'Form' itself become self-derivative and itself a victim of an assault by deconstructive means on barriers, rules, logic, rationality, society, human mortality, religion... isn't that an 'oversharing panic' by self-destructive self-harm meltdown? 'Totalitarian angst and anxiety' defined formal modernism floundering under the weight and terrors of 20th century of self- and mutual destruction. Only an Art evacuation to New York to escape the savagery of Stalin who not only trumped Hitler by dancing on his psychotic ex ally's grave but on Nietzsche's ideological devotion to his 'eternal return' grave! Moreover he buried the medium of Painting into Soviet heroic 'Propaganda Posters' coercing thousands of Artist Painters into ant-modern exile in their own studio's ! Stalin attacked culture as much as Hitler did ! Hitler burned modern Art as degenerate alongside the thousands of Artists he murdered in the death camps like Auschwitz - Painting modern Art did not make you free it made you murdered ! But Stalin used Art to control the collective consciousness and invade individual freedom to think without punishment ! He was the 20th century's definition of dictatorship by getting into and enslaving within people's heads ! Stalin terrorized Painters by inflicting self-censorship and even when they'd conform, Stalin's henchmen would watch all of your near and far family starve and overwork themselves as slaves of 'inevitable' death in Siberian salt mines !
A loop of great despair exists that justifies only a skeleton of Socialist Realism as a monument to Soviet failure; so why did it take 70 years of Sovietism to figure it out? Trapped by the burden of history and destiny, exposing that tightly held belief is like a stain that refuses to remove itself! That level of denial enforced 2DArt (Painting) to find chains and shackles, not just in the USSR, but also prescriptively in the West ! Tacit mutual polar opposite entrenchment needed the West to accuse the Soviets of collaborating with the 2D of limitation of Painting by conformism without any individual freedom by Politburo dictat in a formally exhausted, reductive and derivative medium of Art! Whilst the East needed to accuse the West of hypocrisy, narcissism and elitist clamouring for the American cultural real estate by the Warholian degeneracy and over dependency on new technologies to prop-up an over materialistic 'soulless 'Art by the Yard' consumerism! But did the Soviets even resentfully acknowledge that the free invisible hand of the Art market wasn't manipulating Art Painting but needed to relocate and escape the debris and cultural detritus of war torn Europe to virgin territory in America? Why? Well, because residual Fascism that prevailed only a few months before in all of Europe was not deemed open and ideologically free of vestigial Nazism, especially as many ex-Nazi's were believed to be in hiding in 'East Germany' passing as new converts to Stalin's totalitarianism. Only extremists wanted to revisit dictat, and only America could absorb any damage or fallout from such insidiousness if it ever they skulked over the pond. So, this was a holding pattern that flatlined in terms of ' inter-Art media correspondence' by the time the America's Art brand of Abstract Expressionism became over-esoteric and schismatic not just in the medium of Painting per se, but occupied the rationale in Western conceptualising of Culture and its defence against Cold War Sovietism.
So the cutting-edge of Art enlightenment and inspiration treated Painting as if it was European-centric, and thus 'Old School' infected by 'retarded-Soviet Painting' and immoveable and over-centralised, seen as a weapon to contrast its own solidity with the 'evasive decadence 'of relativist Western indolence' ! Meanwhile the 'Anti-Painters' in the West treated Painting as if it was like at the edge of the formal world and sailing off it in to oblivion 'Columbus thing 'as if the Abstract and the Figurative were the limitations and frontiers in a world that was flat and not round ! Even the Frontier Artists (after Abstract Expressionism) in America had to pan-handle for Painting but discover the goldmine of new exciting technologies and new perspectives and on a massive new scale and beyond any previous location issues.. Art needed to convince itself that being the first and the leader of cultural expression required a Cold War aesthetic stand-off ! Whilst the Soviets wanted to apply 'counter- deconstruction' (a rebuild by structuralist arguments), to the East, they tried to subvert the West by 'reverse-deconstruction' ! What? Screw you up by your own arguments and watch you fry on the proverbial ideological spit with all the Vegas that rubbles can buy! The East thought they could dispose of Culture in the West by rubbing our faces into our own 'social corruption' and self-indulgence and propensity to excess ! Whilst we didn't need bread queues the East didn't need Sovietism but had no access of trying to redress it - it was always going to be a hard ask to eventually tell them and be only half-believed and not be resented and hated for not making more of a song and dance of the West being right ! But the legacy of this Cultural warfare was that never had a medium of Art that had been so controlled or relegated had had so much influence on cultural conflict largely since WW2, in absentia !?!
Western culture had wrestled with the two superpowers of the 'Abstract and the Figurative', and the powers of 'Painting and Modernism' ! The Cultural Western perspective clung to them being subjected to strait-jacket exclusion to the Cultural establishment hierarchy. Why? Because the Art Market needs to incentivize by historicizing all Painting to make bigger profits in Auction Houses. The competition with today's Painters is 'decapitated by omission and relegation in terms of cultural status ! That post Cold War legacy still pervades and values a confluence of pulling down or decapitation of statues by mob rule or cynical nihilistic cultural terror ! Monuments to Soviet dictatorship were knocked down and wheeled out from the junk yard of post Cold War spoils of war whilst Iraqi's pulled down bronze statues of Saddham Hussein as liberation, but ISIS blow-up Buddha statues, and attacked Palmyrian treasured artefacts in abuses of religious extremism as coercive acts of 'hate criminality'! So how to you see WOKE inspired students etc throwing a bronze statue of a Slave Trade profiteer from the 19th century in to the river, hoping he'll be eaten by the fishes or covered by mud and muck because he acquired social mobility and financial reward for cruelty and the inhumane trade of slavery. But haven't those mob rulers drawn attention to him, which hitherto he was some cracking old statue with lots of pigeon shit on his face and shoulders? Couldn't they hold back on the private and public property destruction distraction when they could have replaced him by melting him down and imposing something that the Slave trader would have felt insulting ? Isn't that better justice ? The 'decapitation phenomenon' shares a chequered post Cold War history, and can degenerate into a riot rather than an effective demonstration of the strength of feeling, but removal by violence reminds me of football hooliganism that might have transmitted itself on the youth of the educated middle-classes ! Why should the public have to select whether such statues are brought down by brutal liberation or brutal obliteration? Which or are they both hate -crimes? Or are they a combination, a confluence like the Russian invasion of Ukraine !!? That is rhetorical ! Invasion is an attempt at national decapitation in old or new money, but old tech or new tech, a reincarnation of another Iron Curtain right across the mid -rift of Ukraine is part of the invasions remit ! This upgrade or downgrade of one more reason to make enemies isn't a deterrent its actually a 19th century imperial annexation by military force in the 21st century like some 3D printer of Russian aggression ! How to Paint aggression in the People's medium of Paint to recognise and explain the invasion of sovereignty casts (No pen intended) Painting as a Ukrainian act of defiance and spirit of rebellion! Ukraine will be rebuilt by every canvas if necessary !