How do you hide anti-individualism but through the prism of national identity and centralised control in which the national DNA has a recent experience and predilection to authoritarianism?
Anti-individualism may be de rigueur in most of ex-Warsaw Pact countries who may also have economic ties to the EU, but have established the network of political reaction against post Cold War progressive pragmatism by more than rhetoric. How? 'Cultural confiscation' of the competitive instincts of Artists epitomised by the blackballing of Painting is just one of multiple factors that 'through the back-door of 'Cultural asphyxiation' we have been victimised!! Having laid the groundwork, a simple transference to aesthetic permanence by globalising tech and Conceptual Art, has been the 'Trojan Horse' that has wrong-footed the West, making it the international currency of 'open and free' but in a regressive signalling of an anti-individualist hierarchical agenda championed by the loudest voice. But this 'era of fracture' that endorses radical reaction could actually be exposed as people lurching into radical change for change's sake!? Change is new and promises are made. Why? But does it make world's catch their own tail, in a circular argument ? In order to escape the limitation of diminishing returns short term and long-term performance issues, part of Europe's aspirations can never meet expectations , and people seek redress by cynicism. Like all radicals, you can't live and thrive purely on a heightened vigour of change and transformation without eventually realising that pipe dreams are just pipe dreams, and people may feel betrayed ! The streets aren't paved with gold, and even if they were, 'why has everyone got more of it than you ??' .This isn't a mentality that eye-popping aggression can maintain without severe conflict both internally and then exported.! But ,my goodness, isn't it too powerful a toxic mixture ??!!
The Cold War and the (Russian) Sovietism seems as though it's not done yet !It has morphed into (and hence not been eradicated)compromising its erstwhile anti-Capitalist stance in order to use Capitalism to finance Russian incursions of an imperial expansionism by state and military coercion ! it has deconstructed back (from the original western policy against the Soviets) and asset-stripped the West by contrivance, manipulation and misappropriation, and now has caught-up technologically with the West. Why? In order to deploy AI hacking, use of drones and state control of social media in Russia, to manage how they invade Ukraine !! The very tech that Putin got from Western investment in the aftermath of the Cold War !!!?, and we gave them the tools to exploit them !!??
But hold-on, such a body such as TATT may be one of many Western inspirations for Putin's dogmatism or his battle-plan after all. Crucially, TATT of the UK is without a defined combination of measures to make it accountable, it exists as an unelected forum to preside by rumour and by academic intervention, whereas Putin is elected !!!??? I might give TATT a tough time, but I still can - spot the difference !! Moreover TATT still remains as a collection of unofficial, uncentralised, eclectic group who rarely meet in an organised way, who are suspicious of conspiracies and who are not composed of a distinct hierarchy without any financial profit motive or gains to benefit from !?! But they are also not formally made accountable either !? But sorry Sarkov (Putin's main spin Doctor) , but it is not TATT in the UK that you can take your inspiration for your corruption and militarism, and your mutated version of nationalistic aggression and ardour all under the guise of nostalgia !! Let's be clear those who decide ongoing aesthetic value and overall Art priority and policy in the UK are also from a different demographic than the political establishment in the UK, unlike ex KGB officer President Putin - that's their very Russian establishment that that ex Cold War ex KGB officer presides over.! Now that would be fascinating to sociologically see where all his main 'Cabinet etc' originate from??!! TATT may be obdurate, short-termist and even acting beyond its jurisdiction, (let alone when arbitrary action is taken) but it is never hankering to return to the Cold War , whereas Putin wants to win the very next one, that he'll mould it in his image ! Too many selfies from the Old days Vlad !
But how did TATT make Painting radioactive as well as 2 dimensional metaphorically speaking ? Via the collision of public antipathy, misunderstanding and boredom, where Curator unoriginality and over-micromanagement, and the deviant international Art market, coordinated by action and inaction by TATT.. But there is more, and it was a domestic confluence : the British Art establishment of the 1980s championed 2 seminal Painters who butchered the medium and bookended the last embers of positivity and the medium of Painting ! Come on down Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon ! The nude study was tortured by both, even Freud tried to redeem himself in later years by sympathetic studies of far larger women (Big Sue), who were celebrated and not distorted by his oeuvre ! in fact the other major British voice of Painting was the liberated new emigre to Californian- Yorkshireman David Hockney, but whose emergence from a tired and brutalised UK only put the spotlight on the decay, horror and degeneracy of Freud and Bacon, and by association, the medium of Painting that he'd left behind !!!!
But the medium of Painting had been decimated originally by modernism over-heating, rather than higher technical advantages of Conceptual art etc, as well as the reputations of Freud and Bacon. Why is this so important? Because it establishes that there are going to be many epochs of modernist Painting in the future and not just the past, that tells us that like the past they will all have a different focus and treatment of subject-matter. that will range wildly ! Modernist Painting is for every era to transform by methods and Paint, but can this actually work ? Paradoxically, Painting's nemesis is also its collateral ! Modernist epochs will always have a Pictorial future because, in short,yesterday's landscape and portrait, or today's Realism and Surrealism will be different from tomorrow's version ! Ironic isn't it ? It'll look different but will always win the day ; technology will not make Painting obsolete, it will make for a visual challenge that differs in every generation, but tech will make tech old to be replaced by the latest youthful model that will experience the same fate ! ...and we have another circular argument !!?
The velvet revolution will be a reinstatement of Painting ! It'll will make so many changes on every social, political, economic, gender, ethnic identity....etc ways that the human experience will never stop evolving or devolving!!!! It's what we do ! But no single Painter will make that unique contribution, they will, however, pass on the baton ! But if we can say goodbye and good riddance to 20th century villains like Hitler and Stalin etc we can say goodbye to TATT's 20th century evaluation of how Painting got kicked into the long grass and relegated to the 2nd tier of Art by TATT ! But it affords us a reminder that the 21st century version retains the eponymous reputation of our particular age, a 'love /hate relationship that both devoirs and provides' !
Art can be a healing process, but if Art therapy and the 'Art Aspirin' is of any medium, it's got to be Painting ! Really ? Isn't that cheesy ? Sure, but today you have to put an Art medium under pressure to get the best out of it to explore the 21st century. Well mass unemployment will follow mass automation, so Art in general will become a self-help act of social responsibility ! Or therapy becomes Art in mass therapy, a self-validation through Art. So, we have to aspire to be 'a glass a quarter full', all the way always ! But why not ? How has such a once exclusive medium got turfed out, reinstated and then becomes a weathervane to monitor societies health ? Will it become the medium that could avoid the feeding frenzy of being either or both prey or preyed upon ? Art is a cannibalistic monster only if we distort it ! It is because Paint is an individualist pursuit without the need for high tech or expensive tech that it has mass appeal ? Apart from the limited changes to upgrade Paint and or the canvas....it has largely advanced as far as it can that out competes the revolving door of high tech today .No wonder it is without the tech dependence that so many other Art media suffer from,and no wonder it will not trouble the wallet because it remains level on expenditure outlay that may be far more of a price range of the many and not the few ! So much access for so many new and older persistent Painters for this and the next generations of Painters ! ?!
We're so used to mobile phones that we don't need a watch, but we will always rely on Paint and a canvas to remind us that we are original, human and in a social context with others
who may not share all takes on life but for some reason TATT isn't so benevolent to the medium of Painters !!?? But any attack on the individual ego will always make you grounded ! But could Painting thrive because it allows us to forget the most important thing in the world "our ego's"!!?? Why? Because if we don't we are only half the people we could be but claim that we're twice the people we actually are....!!!!
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