Rothko Quotes

Silence is so accurate.

I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.

It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again.

You’ve got sadness in you, I’ve got sadness in me – and my works of art are places where the two sadnesses can meet, and therefore both of us need to feel less sad.

When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing. No galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet, it was a golden age, for we all had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large I shall not venture to discuss. But I do know, that many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope we find them.

A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent.

The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental.

Pictures must be miraculous.

A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.

Great works of art in all cultures succeed in capturing within the constraints of their form both the pathos of anguish and a vision of its resolution. Take, for example, the languorous sentences of Proust or the haiku of Basho, the late quartets and sonatas of Beethoven, the tragicomic brushwork of Sengai or the daunting canvases of Rothko, the luminous self-portraits of Rembrandt and Hakuin. Such works achieve their resolution not through consoling or romantic images whereby anguish is transcended. They accept anguish without being overwhelmed by it. They reveal anguish as that which gives beauty its dignity and depth.

For, while the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.

We thus see the artist performing a dual function: first, furthering the integrity of the process of self-expression in the language of art; and secondly, protecting the organic continuity of art in relation to its own laws. For like any organic substance, art must always be in a state of flux, the tempo being slow or fast. But it must move.

But nobody is visually naive any longer. We are cluttered with images, and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine.

If you are only moved by color relationships, you are missing the point. I am interested in expressing the big emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom.

Silence is so accurate

I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.

the constant repetition of falsehood is more convincing than the demonstration of truth.

You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Brontë sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O'Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

ROTHKO: (Explodes) 'Pretty.' 'Beautiful.' 'Nice.' 'Fine.' That's our life now! Everything's 'fine'. We put on the funny nose and glasses and slip on the banana peel and the TV makes everything happy and everyone's laughing all the time, it's all so goddamn funny, it's our constitutional right to be amused all the time, isn't it? We're a smirking nation, living under the tyranny of 'fine.' How are you? Fine.. How was your day? Fine. How are you feeling? Fine. How did you like the painting? Fine. What some dinner? Fine... Well, let me tell you, everything is not fine!! HOW ARE YOU?!... HOW WAS YOUR DAY?!... HOW ARE YOU FEELING? Conflicted. Nuanced. Troubled. Diseased. Doomed. I am not fine. We are not fine. We are anything but fine... Look at these pictures. Look at them! You see the dark rectangle, like a doorway, an aperture, yes but it’s also a gaping mouth letting out a silent howl of something feral and foul and primal and REAL. Not nice. Not fine. Real. A moan of rapture. Something divine or damned. Something immortal, not comic books or soup cans, something beyond me and beyond now. And whatever it is, it’s not pretty and it’s not fine...I AM HERE TO STOP YOUR HEART‬

You said how Michelangelo was a manic-depressive who portrayed himself as a flayed martyr in his painting. Henri Matisse gave up being a lawyer because of appendicitis. Robert Schumann only began composing after his right hand became paralyzed and ended his career as a concert pianist. (...) You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Bronte sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O’Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness. “According to Thomas Mann,” Peter said, “‘Great artists are great invalids.

It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.

But a generation that does not aspire to seriousness, to meaning, is unworthy to walk in the shadow of those who have gone before, I mean those who have struggled and surmounted, I mean those who have aspired, I mean Rembrandt, I mean Turner, I mean Michelangelo and Matisse … I mean obviously Rothko.

Art is such an action. It is a kindred form of action to idealism. They are both expressions of the same drive, and the man who fails to fulfill this urge in one form or another is as guilty of escapism as the one who fails to occupy himself with the satisfaction of bodily needs. In fact, the man who spends his entire life turning the wheels of industry so that he has neither time nor energy to occupy himself with any other needs of his human organism is by far a greater escapist than the one who developed his art. For the man who develops his art does make adjustments to his physical needs. He understands that man must have bread to live, while the other cannot understand that you cannot live by bread alone.

It is really one of the most serious faults which can be found with the whole conception of democracy, that its cultural function must move on the basis of the common denominator. Such a point of view indeed would make a mess of all of the values which we have developed for examining works of art. It would address one end of education in that it would consider that culture which was available to everyone, but in that achievement it would eliminate culture itself. This is surely the death of all thought. This quote is taken from "The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art" by Mark Rothko, written 1940-1 and published posthumously in 2004 by Yale University Press, pp.126-7.

In a world filled with mistrust, armed to the teeth and ready to explode, a realistic attitude might be to consider love as an imperative need.

I like to keep my dreams attainable. Eat cheese, sleep on a nice bed, have my work in the same museum as Rothko--the usual.

Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit.

Frente a Rothko, una busca frases salidas de un sermón dominical pero no encuentra más que eufemismos. Lo que uno querría decir en realidad es «puta madre».

Mark Rothko once wrote, “Silence is so accurate.” We

He has. A fucking. Rothko. Over the fireplace

Mishima. Rothko. Hemingway. Berryman. Koestler. Pavese. Kosinski. Arshile Gorky. Primo Levi. Hart Crane. Walter Benjamin. Peerless bunch. Nothing dishonorable signing on there.

That was the way people here talked about art. Nothing was by anyone. The sculpture is Calder. The painting is Rothko. The house is Neutra. And Alex was late.

You might as well get one thing straight. I'm not an abstractionist... I'm not interested in the relationships of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures show that I communicate those basic human emotions... The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.

Nevertheless, we react to one a bit differently than we do to Rothko’s hovering panels or Barnett Newman’s stripes, though Whistler does approach their extremity of abstraction; part of our pleasure lies in recognizing bridges and buildings in the mist, and in sensing the damp riverine silence, the glimmering metropolitan presence. … The painting - a single blurred stripe of urban shore - is additionally daring in that the sky and sea are no shade of blue, but, instead, an improbable, pervasive cobalt green. Human vision is here taken to its limits, and modern painting, as a set of sensations realized in paint, is achieved.

Rodchenko says his one-color, all-over canvases are non-representational and no more than a piece of painted material, while Mark Rothko says that his monochrome canvas is much more; it has some mystical, emotional and spiritual depth.

I stand in front of the Rothko—the dark, muted blocks of color. “This just depresses me,” I say. “Yup. How you react tells you something about your emotional state, and you can unpack where that comes from.” “Canvas as therapist,” I muse.

The Sleeping I have imagined all this: In 1940 my parents were in love And living in the loft on West 10th Above Mark Rothko who painted cabbage roses On their bedroom walls the night they got married. I can guess why he did it. My mother’s hair was the color of yellow apples And she wore a velvet hat with her pajamas. I was not born yet. I was remote as starlight. It is hard for me to imagine that My parents made love in a roomful of roses And I wasn’t there. But now I am. My mother is blushing. This is the wonderful thing about art. It can bring back the dead. It can wake the sleeping As it might have late that night When my father and mother made love above Rothko Who lay in the dark thinking Roses, Roses, Roses.

Profs who go to Knossos to look for books on Phobos or Kronos go on to jot down monophthongs (kof or rho) from two monoglot scrolls on Thoth, old god of Copts - both scrolls torn from hornbooks, now grown brown from mold. Profs who gloss works of Woolf, Gogol, Frost or Corot look for books from Knopf: Oroonoko or Nostromo - not Hopscotch (nor Tlooth). Profs who do schoolwork on Pollock look for photobooks on Orozco or Rothko (two tomfools who throw bold colors, blotch on blotch, onto tondos of dropcloth).

His room was a sickly dual-tone of crimson and charcoal, like an Untitled Rothko, the colours bleeding into each other horribly and then rather serenely. The overall effect was overwhelmingly unapologetic but it grew on you like a wart on your nose you didn't realise it was a part of your identity until one day it simply was. His room was his identity. Fiercely bold, avant-garde but never monotonous. He was red, he was black, he was bored, and he was fire. At least to me he seemed like fire. A tornado of fire that burned all in its wake leaving only the wretched brightness of annihilation. His room was where he charmed and disarmed us. We were his playthings. Nobody plays with fire and leaves unscarred. The fire soon seeps into chard and soot. The colours of his soul, his aura, and probably his heart if he didn't stop smoking.

 You would have loved Jackson. He was a downtown guy, a real Bohemian. No banker’s hours for him, believe you me. Every night the drinking and the talking and the fighting and the dancing and the staying up late; like everyone’s romantic idea of what an artist ought to be: the anti-Rothko... At his worst you still loved him though; you loved him because he loved art so much... He thought it mattered. He thought painting mattered... Does not the poignancy stop your heart?... How could this story not end in tragedy?  Goya said, 'We have Art that we may not perish from Truth.'... Pollock saw some truth. Then he didn’t have art to protect him any more... Who could survive that?  I was walking up to my house last week and this couple was passing. Lady looks in the window, says: 'I wonder who owns all the Rothkos.'... Just like that I’m a noun. A Rothko.

Therefore we can posit this generalization: That a painting is the representation of the artist’s notion of reality in the terms of the plastic elements. The creation of a plastic unit reduces all the phenomena of the time to a unity of sensuality and thereby relates the subjective and objective in its relevance to man. Art therefore is a generalization. The use of the plastic elements to any other ends, which are most usually particularizations and descriptions of appearances, or which serve the stimulation of separate senses, are not in the category of art and must be classified in the category of applied arts.

In art, as in biology, there is a phenomenon that can be described as mutation, in which appearances radically change at a tempo much more rapid than that at which they normally proceed. As in the case of biology, we have no means to determine the process by which this radical change occurs. Yet we do know that it is a reaction to a form of congestion. It is a desperate change due to the arrival at a point where the corollaries to a situation are exhausted, when the stimulus to additional growth is sluggish and a rapid rejuvenation is needed so that art, through disuse, does not atrophy in much the same way as an unused human organ. Here art must attain a new start if it is to survive. Then, assiduously, it renews its traditions by marriage with alien traditions, by the reexamination of its own processes, and by those means reestablishes contact again with its own roots. It is in this way that new plastic worlds are born. For art, like a race, cannot inbreed very long without losing its incentives to continue; it needs the rejuvenation of new experiences and new blood. These mutations, it must be clear, however, do not constitute a change in properties, or mean that art has discarded its past. On the contrary, mutation involves a more conscious evaluation of art’s inheritance and the redirection of that inheritance into channels where it can be continued with greater force.

Tanta istruzione, e non serve a nulla. Nulla può isolare dal più infimo livello del pensiero.

The idea of making is the first and the most human of ideas. To 'explain' is always only to describe a manner of making; it is merely to remake by thought. The Why and the How which are simply expressions for what this idea requires, arise in every context, and insist on being satisfied at any price.

ROTHKO: All those bugs – ach! I know, those plein air painters, they sing to you endless paeans about the majesty of natural sunlight. Get out there and muck around in the grass, they tell you, like a cow. When I was young I didn’t know any better so I would haul my supplies out there and the wind would blow the paper and the easel would fall over and the ants would get in the paint. Oy… But then I go to Rome for the first time. I go to the Santa Maria del Popolo to see Caravaggio’s ‘Conversion of Saul,’ which turns out is tucked away in a dark corner of this dark church with no natural light. It’s like a cave. But the painting glowed! With a sort of rapture it glowed. Consider: Caravaggio was commissioned to paint the picture for this specific place, he had no choice. He stands there and he looks around. It’s like under the ocean it’s so goddamn dark. How’s he going to paint here? He turns to his creator: ‘God, help me, unworthy sinner that I am. Tell me, O Lord on High, what the fuck do I do now?!’     KEN laughs. ROTHKO: Then it comes to him: the divine spark. He illuminates the picture from within! He gives it inner luminosity. It lives… Like one of those bioluminescent fish from the bottom of the ocean, radiating its own effulgence. You understand? Caravaggio was –

Flash after flash across the horizon: Tourists trying to take the Grand Canyon By night. They don’t know Every last shot will turn out black. It takes Rothko sixty years to arrive At the rim of his canyon. He goes there only after dark. As he stands at the railing, his pupils open Like a camera shutter at the slowest speed. He has to be patient. He has to lean Far over the railing To see the color as of darkness: Purple, numb brown, mud-red, mauve -an abyss of bruises. At first, you’d think it was black on black Something you son’t want to look at, he says As he waits, The colors vibrate in the chasm Like voices: You there with the eyes, Bring back something from The brink of nothing to make us see.

We both had wanted to see a Mark Rothko exhibit at the Yale Art Gallery but, because of a labor dispute, some of the university's buildings, including the museum, were closed. As Bill and I walked by, he decided he could get us in if we offered to pick up the litter that had accumulated in the gallery's courtyard. Watching him talk our way in was the first time I saw his persuasiveness in action. We had the entire museum to ourselves. We wandered through the galleries talking about Rothko and twentieth-century art. I admit to being surprised at his interest in and knowledge of subjects that seemed, at first, unusual for a Viking from Arkansas. We ended up in the museum's courtyard, where I sat in the large lap of Henry Moore's sculpture Drape Seated Woman while we talked until dark.

the Temple was rebuilt, but by then the religion of Israel had been marked forever by the piety of the exile. Alongside the single Temple, where blood sacrifice was celebrated, arose numerous synagogues, places for meeting and for prayer, and the dominium of the priests yielded to the growing influence of the Pharisees and Scribes, men of the book and of study. In 70 A.D., the Roman legions again destroyed the Temple. But the learned rabbi Joahannah ben-Zakkaj, slipped covertly out of Jerusalem through the siege and obtained permission from Vespasian to continue the teaching of the Torah in the city of Jamnia. The temple has never been rebuilt since, and study, the Talmud, has become the real temple of Israel.24 This complex relationship to the Talmud is in fact a key to understanding the life and work of Mark Rothko.

ROTHKO: So, now, what do you see? – Be specific. No, be exact. Be exact – but sensitive. You understand? Be kind. Be a human being, that’s all I can say. Be a human being for once in your life! These pictures deserve compassion and they live or die in the eye of the sensitive viewer, they quicken only if the empathetic viewer will let them. That is what they cry out for. That is why they where created. That is what they deserve… Now… What do you see?     Beat. KEN: Red. ROTHKO: But do you like it? KEN: Mm. ROTHKO: Speak up. KEN: Yes. ROTHKO: Of course you like it – how can you not like it?! Everyone likes everything nowadays. They like the television and the phonograph and the soda pop and the shampoo and the Cracker Jack. Everything becomes everything else and it’s all nice and pretty and likable. Everything is fun in the sun! Where’s the discernment? Where’s the arbitration that separates what I like from what I respect, what I deem worthy, what has…listen to me now…significance.

the Inka style was severe, abstract, stripped down to geometric forms—startlingly contemporary, in fact. (According to the Peruvian critic César Paternosto, such major twentieth-century painters as Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko were inspired by Inka art.)

In my work, we find the direct consciousness of an essential humanity. Monet shared this quality and for that I prefer Monet to Cézanne....

* If an introverted hospice patient were to say, “Give me one to three things that I can watch, do, absorb, look at, etc., without human interaction,” what would your answer be? “I guess I’d put a picture book of Mark Rothko paintings in front of them. I would put probably any music by Beethoven into their ears. And I probably would reserve that third thing for staring into space.

Back rubs,” she says without even pausing to think about it. “Long and luxurious and totally aimless back rubs.” “Hot showers,” he says. “Incredibly hot. Like, use-all-the-hot-water-in-the-whole-building hot.” “The first sip of water when you’re really thirsty.” “The first sip of coffee in the morning.” “The smell of dryer exhaust.” “The smell of hot asphalt at an amusement park.” “Sprinting into the ocean.” “A hayride at sunset.” “Lobster rolls, warm, with melted butter.” “Cheese ravioli out of a can.” “Whoopie pies with marshmallow fluff.” “Tater Tots with mayonnaise.” “The moment everyone at a wedding stands up at the first few notes of the bridal march.” “When you stare at a Rothko so long it looks like it’s vibrating.” “The statue of David.” “American Gothic.” “The beginning of Mozart Forty.” “Rage Against the Machine.” “The violin solo from Scheherazade.

Aside from being famous, what do Beethoven, Mark Rothko, Hemingway, Francis Ford Coppola, Van Gogh, Alvin Ailey, Robin Williams, Sylvia Plath, Balzac, Jackson Pollock, Edgar Allan Poe, Axl Rose, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf have in common? They all suffered from some form of mental illness. Even

The world would have never had Rothko or Chagall if both of them had done what was expected of them.

In portraiture I look for people that I recognise - 'Look, it's Uncle Tony' - or for the faces of film stars. The Madame Tussaud's school of art appreciation. In realist works I look for detail; 'Look at the eyelashes!' I say, in idiotic admiration at the fineness of the brush. 'Look at the reflection in his eye!' In abstract art I look for colour - 'I love the blue' as if the works of Rothko and Mondrian were little more than immense paint charts. I understand the superficial thrill of seeing the object in the flesh, so to speak; the sightseeing approach that lumps together the Grand Canyon, the Taj Mahal and the Sistine Chapel as items to tick off. I understand rarity and uniqueness, the 'how much?' school of criticism.

Once he gave her a Rothko book—an interesting choice, since like Elliott, Rothko also attended Lincoln High School in Portland (as had poet Gary Snyder and Simpsons creator Matt Groening). The

cautiously. “Mark Rothko? Is that when he got Alizée’s paintings from Eleanor Roosevelt?” “He gets the painting from the other one.” I sat up, senses heightened. “What other one?” “She gives him the one he carries with him all the time.” “Is it big?” I asked. “Red, white, and blue? Or does it look like lily pads?” “Bloom. That is where we go first. We are worried she is . . .” Grand-mère made a circular motion with her forefinger. “She is not all there in the head.” “The painting looks like blooms? Like flowers?” Lily Pads could be interpreted that way. “Did you go with him to visit Eleanor Roosevelt?

The Latvian painter has a special love for diffused outdoor light which seems to penetrate the bodies and emanate from them," a light that reappears within, and from behind, Rothko's paintings, an illumination glimpsed through a hazy doorway or window, a light longed for but beyond reach.

The Latvian painter has a special love for diffused outdoor light which seems to penetrate the bodies and emanate from them," a light that reappears within, and from behind, Rothko's paintings, an illumination glimpsed through a hazy doorway or window, a light longed for but beyond reach.

As for Reka’s own artistic career, it might seem absurd that the CIA funded modern art in a blow for the culture war against the USSR, but it is very true: government funds sent a sensational collection of abstract expressionist art called The New American Painting on a tour of Europe, comprised of works by Pollock, Rothko, and many more. One woman artist was represented in the collection—Elaine de Kooning, who specialized in abstract portraits, including a famous depiction of JFK in the sixties. Reka’s work is based on hers.

I desire to write, be wildly in love, support my son to be who he is, keep my hair thick and shiny, get more tattoos, recite mantras, speak onstage, sleep in linen sheets, drive alone in the wide open spaces of New Mexico for hours, be flexible and productive, be alone at parties, be alone at home, be alone, be liked-loved-respected, keep a temple-tidy house, drive a reliable car, make millions of dollars and give lots away, meditate, get caught in thunderstorms, dance long and hard, wear cashmere, make things that make people want to make things of their own, sleep in, recycle, be One, seek approval, go to weddings (and funerals), order in, worship Rothko paintings, call my grandmother, free spiders, go back to India, stay up too late, get just the right font spacing, listen to Tibetan singing bowls on repeat for hours, watch three documentaries in a row, give all I have to give at any given moment to pretty much anybody, wear perfume every day of the week, shave my head, burn everything I’ve ever written, give insight, give money, give time, find my True Nature, and touch the face of God … Why do I desire what I desire? The answer is fast, clear, and simple: to feel good, of course.

Do you remember the first time I met you?, In June in the bleak of winter. I looked at you at an acute angle, your eyes glued at Mark Rothko painting, I told you I am a fun of his painting, I told you how he committed suicide, I told you how he saw the world and you said I am speaking lies, you said I must work more on my dating skills, you said people who love painting are lacking romance, you told me people obsessed in painting are lacking emotions.... I told you I had found you statue glued thus means you slot the same line with me. You live in my light and compliment my deaths.....

Dicen que hay que pararse frente a una tela de Rothko como frente a un amanecer. Son cuadros bellísimos, pero la belleza puede ser sublime o puede ser decorativa, y en los livings neoyorquinos del Upper East Side sus cuadros combinaban deliciosamente bien con los sofás de cuero y las alfombras de angora.

1940s in The Tiger’s Eye—a short-lived, adventuresome magazine that also featured work by Pollock, Rothko, and Still

Rothko’s paintings consist of strong formal elements such as color, shape, balance, depth, composition, and scale.

As Rothko was to say about these later works, “A painting is not a picture of an experience. It is an experience.

This world of the imagination is fancy free and violently opposed to common sense.

Because I thought I would be helping low-income women or spousal abuse victims achieve emancipation! Instead, I’m working with some rich woman whose biggest priority in life is selling her rare Rothko painting so that her husband can’t get it.” Samantha couldn’t help

Surely . . . Judaism is more than the history of anti-semitism. Surely Jews deserve to be defined—and are in fact defined, by others as well as by themselves—by those qualities of faith, lineage, sacred texts and moral teachings that have enabled them to endure through centuries of persecution. —GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB1 In many spheres of life, Jews have made contributions that are far larger than might be expected from their numbers. Jews constitute 0.2% of the world’s population, but won 14% of Nobel Prizes in the first half of the 20th century, despite social discrimination and the Holocaust, and 29% in the second. As of 2007, Jews had won an amazing 32% of Nobel Prizes awarded in the 21st century.2 Jews have excelled not only in science but also in music (Mendelssohn, Mahler, Schoenberg), in painting (Pissarro, Modigliani, Rothko), and in philosophy (Maimonides, Bergson, Wittgenstein). Jewish authors have won the Nobel Prize in Literature for writing in English, French, German, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Yiddish and Hebrew.3 Such achievement requires an explanation, and an interesting possibility is that Jews have adapted genetically to a way of life that requires higher than usual cognitive capacity. People are highly imitative, and if the Jewish advantage were purely cultural, such as hectoring mothers or a special devotion to education, there would be little to prevent others from copying it. Instead, given the new recognition of human evolution in the historical past, it is possible that Jewish intellectual achievement has emerged from some pressure in their special history. Just as races have evolved in the recent past, ethnicities within races will also evolve if they are reproductively isolated to some extent from their host population, whether by geography or religion. The adaptation of Jews to a special cognitive niche, if indeed this has been an evolutionary process, as is argued below, represents a striking example of natural selection’s ability to change a human population in just a few centuries.

Budismo Que todo lo que vive, todo lo nacido o que va a nacer; que todo lo que respira (el gato Caruso, una hoja, tú voz, o el Rojo y naranja sobre fondo rojo de Mark Rothko); que todo lo que salta, roe, corre, trepa, clava, planea o viaja, que todo eso sea muy feliz.

«Puede que mirar un Rothko tenga algo de experiencia espiritual, pero de una clase que no admite palabras. Es como visitar los glaciares o atravesar un desierto. Pocas veces lo inadecuado del lenguaje se vuelve tan patente. Frente a Rothko, una busca frases salidas de un sermón dominical pero no encuentra más que eufemismos. Lo que uno querría decir en realidad es “puta madre”».

Lonesomeness. Morandi, Cezanne, it's all about lonesomeness. And Rothko. Especially Rothko.

Noa sleeps with the curtains open, allowing as much moonlight as possible to flood her bedroom, allowing her to see each and every picture on the walls, if only as a pale glimmer. It took Noa weeks to perfect the art display. Reproductions of Monet's gardens at Giverny blanket one wall: thousands of violets- smudges of purples and mauves- and azaleas, poppies, and peonies, tulips and roses, water lilies in pastel pinks floating on serene lakes reflecting weeping willows and shimmers of sunshine. Turner's sunsets adorn another: bright eyes of gold at the center of skies and seas of searing magenta or soft blue. The third wall is splashed with Jackson Pollocks: a hundred different colors streaked and splattered above Noa's bed. The fourth wall is decorated by Rothko: blocks of blue and red and yellow blending and bleeding together. The ceiling is papered with the abstract shapes of Kandinsky: triangles, circles, and lines tumbling over one another in energetic acrobatics.

It’s even possible to get there with art. Utterly modern painters like Vassily Kandinsky and Mark Rothko were expressly attempting to create spiritual, and maybe even shamanic, experiences with their paintings. If you sit in the Rothko room at the Tate Modern, you may find yourself slipping into connective consciousness and able to release something to find peace. As well as totally ‘organic’ practices

Puede que mirar un Rothko tenga algo de experiencia espiritual, pero de una clase que no admite palabras. Es como visitar los glaciares o atravesar un desierto. Pocas veces lo inadecuado del lenguaje se vuelve tan patente.

Como los Médicis han sido sustituidos por sus equivalentes artísticos de trabajadores del Departamento de Vehículos a Motor, la consecuencia es un mundo del arte repleto de basura visualmente repulsiva creada en cuestión de minutos por vagos aficionados sin talento que buscan obtener un rápido cheque estafando a los aspirantes a formar parte de la clase artística en todo el mundo con absurdos cuentos urdidos sobre que su arte simboliza algo más que la total depravación del sinvergüenza que pretende erigirse en artista. Sólo llevó unas horas concebir el «arte» de Mark Rothko, pero fue vendido a incautos coleccionistas con millones de la actual moneda inestable, consolidando sin duda el arte contemporáneo como el más lucrativo timo de nuestro tiempo. Un artista moderno no necesita tener talento ni trabajar duro ni esforzarse al máximo, sólo tiene que exhibir un semblante serio y una actitud esnob cuando explique a los nuevos ricos por qué las salpicaduras de pintura sobre un lienzo son algo más que espantosas e involuntarias salpicaduras de pintura, y cómo su incapacidad para entender la inexplicable obra de arte es fácil de subsanar con un buen cheque. Lo que es asombroso no es sólo la preponderancia de basura como la de Rothko en el mundo del arte moderno, sino la visible ausencia de obras maestras que puedan compararse con las grandes obras del pasado. Es imposible ignorar que no se construyen demasiadas Capillas Sixtinas en la actualidad; tampoco existen muchos cuadros comparables con las grandes pinturas de Leonardo, Rafael, Rembrandt, Caravaggio o Vermeer. Esto resulta aún más sorprendente cuando uno advierte que los avances tecnológicos y la industrialización harían que llevar a cabo dichas obras de arte fuera mucho más sencillo de lo que fue en la época dorada. La Capilla Sixtina deja a los visitantes boquiabiertos, y cualquier explicación más detallada sobre su contenido, su construcción y su historia transformará el asombro en apreciación de la profundidad de pensamiento, del oficio y del trabajo duro puesto en ella. Antes de que Rothko se hiciera famoso, incluso el crítico de arte más pretencioso podría haber pasado junto a uno de sus cuadros abandonado en la acera y no prestarle ninguna atención. Sólo después de que un círculo de críticos idiotas malgastara infinitas horas pontificando para promocionar su obra, los aduladores y los nuevos ricos empezaron a aparentar captar que hay un significado más profundo en ella y a gastar el moderno dinero inestable en ella. Con los años han aflorado varias historias sobre bromistas que han dejado objetos varios en museos de arte contemporáneo, sólo para que los amantes del arte moderno revoloteasen a su alrededor con admiración; algo que demuestra la completa vacuidad de los gustos artísticos de nuestra época. Pero tal vez no haya un tributo más apropiado al valor del arte moderno que el realizado por muchos conserjes de museos de todo el mundo, los cuales, demostrando una admirable perspicacia y dedicación a su trabajo, han arrojado en varias ocasiones costosas instalaciones de arte a la basura, el lugar que les corresponde. Algunos de los «artistas» más emblemáticos de nuestro tiempo, como Damien Hirst, Gustav Metzger, Tracey Emin y la pareja italiana formada por Sara Goldschmied y Eleonora Chiara, han recibido esta valoración crítica por parte de los ordenanzas, más entendidos que los nuevos e inseguros ricos que gastan millones de dólares en lo que aquellos tiran a la basura