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That Monet painting might be operating along extremely fine and subtle principles, and so be highly opaque to the large majority of people who view it in terms of any brilliance it may hold.
My favorite painter is Max Ernst. The genius of his paintings is quite a bit louder and more flamboyant. Even to relative laypersons like myself, it's easy to distinguish his paintings against AI, as AI cannot match him for creativity, intricacy, etc.
This is to say, there might be situations where AI art cannot be separated from masterful human work because the human work operates on principles potentially no one besides the master who created it understands, but for masterful works which are more scrutable, which do exist, it is easy to see that no AI can compare against them.
And the distinction should be made between the creative effort required to conceive a painting and configure it, versus the technical effort required to reproduce one. AI is fully theoretically capable even now of producing identical or near identical copies of works it has seen. The only reason it doesn't, during the course of casual prompting, is that its designers for copyright reasons sought to inhibit that behavior. What AI can't do is create wholly original works, or even to composite existing works at a high level. Anyone saying AI cannot reproduce existing works is wrong. Anyone saying AI can produce good original works is also wrong.
I've never seen anyone mention him in the wild -- The Entire City is one of my favorite paintings, it's haunted me since I saw it in an art book when I was 10 years old. And yeah, AI could never.
Surrealism in general doesn't have a good reputation these days, and wasn't much beloved even in its time.
Magritte and Dali are fairly popular I'd say. Dali is googled about half to a third as often as Picasso, which is really not bad.
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