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There was a story in the Wall St Journal yesterday that made me think about this very topic. The story was about Samuel Waksal, founder of ImClone Systems (Martha Stewart financial scandal). But the angle was the selling of Art. The picture included a canvas by Mark Rothko known as "Untitled (Plum and Brown)"

What Rothko did, was paint an entire rectangular canvas Plum colored. Then, he painted a slightly smaller square which was Brown colored.

This was sold for $3.5M. I only which I had the skill to make art that was so fabulously beautiful (and profitable).

which = wish

What Rothko did, was paint an entire rectangular canvas Plum colored. Then, he painted a slightly smaller square which was Brown colored. This was sold for $3.5M. I only which I had the skill to make art that was so fabulously beautiful (and profitable).

Rothko had to be dead to make the big money

Maybe the vacuousness of modern art, exemplified by Rothko's boring blocks of muted color, can be explained by the way art critics attempt to find meaning in the most trivial works. Here's one waxing eloquent on Rothko's opus:

While it is the glowing, ovoid areas of color that the eye first embraces in a typical Rothko, it is useful to become aware of how they are contextualized with often dramatically emphasized horizons -- and borders. These divisions are mostly two, often three (occasionally more). They define a horizon gestalt between the areas of color; the borders the peripheral limitation of our normal view of any horizon. We thus float at the center of a prospect that falls out as below us, before us and above us -- the artist leaving us to our own associations, but determining within his formal structures, the extent of the world he wants those associations to inhabit. (Here the structure of the works of the early 1940s is crucial -- for they remain latent after 1950.) Thus, Rothko's tripartite and quadripartite compositions present a radical abstraction of the planet in cross-section from below the viewer's feet up, the internal light of that world provides it welcoming warmth or abject negation, as befits the artist's moods. At the end of his life, the last, sad, bipartite images (MRCR 814-831), leave us with a single horizon between the black of space and the earth's lithic interior -- all place of human grace on the surface under the sun having slipped away from his despairing reach.

Imagine if you were the artist, and you read this about a painting that took you all of an hour to paint, including the time it took to scrape off a few colors and try different ones. And then the painting, because of the write-up in Art Forum or wherever, sells for $100,000. What would you do? Paint more of them, naturally!

In my opinion, it was not despair but boredom which drove Rothko to kill himself.