Perhaps as a society we’ve actually grown up. Having seen episode one of Bridgeton and social and emotional suppression taken to extremes, lived through the sexual revolution of the late 60s when for some all ‘rules’ went out of the window, to whatever we have today...
There is nothing new about artists poking the bear for a variety of causes from government inaction to government action
Michaelangelo, though, was somewhat different. Half a millennium after he painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling the then pope decided to have the accumulated candle soot cleaned off. What the cleaning revealed was intense colour. Michaelangelo, being long dead, might well have insisted on having it cleaned sooner if he’d known how little care the Catholic church was going to take of it.
Pollock himself believed that there was a section of the art world that regarded his as a decorator.
…….Kelani Nichole, who first priced and sold artworks in bitcoin in 2013 as the owner of the Transfer Gallery who said that ‘it’s absurdity at every level of implementation [the auction sale]. They, Christies, sold a JPEG. This was a $69 million marketing stunt……
He never called himself an artist and knew little or nothing about the world of artists, but the drawings on the walls of his house of cityscapes and the portraits he drew as a teenager said otherwise. Born at a different time, who knows. He died in March 2021 a few months shy of his 99th birthday. A life lived.