Thanks for reinforcing negative stereotypes about conservatives concerning art. If you had any knowledge of Rothko's history, you wouldn't make such asinine comments.
I paid thousands of Daddy's good dollars for art school, dipstick. For once, I have the qualifications to run my mouth off.
I repeat: if you have to know the artist's history to understand the art, he has failed. He might be a really interesting case history, but he's no artist.
I'm sure that many of us would carry these negative stereotypes as a badge of honour. Rothko's appreciation of his own work is mystagogic twaddle and should be recognised as such.
But you touch on an interesting point: there is a fault line between Democrats and Conservatives, not least in the way the two groups engage with this sort of "art". It is similar to the way in which the two groups accept - or reject - communist dialectic and post-modernism.
The Democrats are more vulnerable to this sort of guff because they have a lack-of-belief system, a kind of extreme skepticism which can find no floor to the universe. As Chesterton famously said -
When people no longer believe in God, they do not start to believe in Nothing. They start believing in Everything
If you had no knowledge of his history, you would see how empty and meaningless his work is without it. It only has content because critics and art historians have imbued it with Rothko's personal angst. Without that, it doesn't stand on it's own.
It's just blocks of color, done repetitively. Like Jack Nickolsen's character in The Shining typed "all work and no play make jack a dull boy", over and over. In itself, and without knowing that it was created by a madman, the words have no value. So also with Rothko's works.