I think photography dealt that blow. Surrealism was quite late to the grave-dancing ceremony, perhaps 80 years after the first photograph, so not much connecti

I think photography dealt that blow. Surrealism was quite late to the grave-dancing ceremony, perhaps 80 years after the first photograph, so not much connection. Maybe there had to be an Impressionist interlude, with some transitional squinting at external reality, before art could become truly introspective. Surrealism was even a few decades after Freud, but hot on the heels of Cubism, other fin-de-siècle Modernisms, and roughly contemporary with stream-of-consciousness writing (Proust, Joyce, Woolf, also Kafka). [Also, the role of WWI cannot be underestimated. It cleared the landscape in many ways, destroyed old contexts (e.g. death of Futurism), launched desperate soul-searching, and was existentially challenging at every level - a long sidebar to be had there.] Culture seems rather slow to adapt to science. Interestingly, there is little traffic in the other direction, but math & physics also had their modern moments just before - Paris Math Congress 1900, Planck 1900, Einstein 1905... Perhaps sci-fi fiction prefigures future technology? But while there are a few famed prophets (H.G.Wells, W.Gibson), they are mostly hindisght/survivor bias. The genre has success in the same way that a shotgun kills a pigeon. Very little insight, lots of trajectories, few hits.