You reach an age when friends, your generation
Dying off like flies.
And you, full of ideas
Alive and kicking,
Finger licking fresh in mind,
Trying to find
One out there,
To read your wares,
Your teeming thoughts,
Aware and deep with meaning,
Warranting a reader.
Radar at its most intense.
Looking, writing, hoping for an audience,
Shakespeare felt the selfsame yearning -
Handel, Beethoven, earning by conducting,
Not to mention poor Van Gogh
Who went the way of painters who sell nothing go.
To write, paint, sculpt, dance, sing, compose:
Any noise that oozes art;
For whom?
That is the theme, the problem
And the question.
Vincent van Gogh's last two self-portraits
Vincent van Gogh painted about 40 self-portraits over a 10-year period because he could not afford to hire a model. The last one was painted in Arles in 1889 after he quarreled with fellow painter Paul Gauguin, amputated part of his earlobe with a razor, wrapped it in a newspaper, and gave it to a prostitute. He died two days after he shot himself in the chest in 1890. Although he created ca. 2,100 artworks in that decade, including 860 oil paintings (most of them in his last two years), he only sold one in his lifetime, a landscape entitled "The Red Vineyard at Arles." He also exchanged many paintings for food or art supplies. In 1990, Saito Ryoei bought his "Portrait of Dr. Gaschet" for $82.5 millionr, the highest ever for a painting at that time. Only three years earlier, Goto Yasuo had bought his "Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers" (which he had painted in anticipation of Gauguin moving in with him) for $39,921,750, more than four times the previous record price, and introduced a new era in high-value prices, which was followed a few months later by Alan Bond's purchase of his "Irises" for $53.9 million. Seven of his paintings (including "Portrait de l'artiste sans barbe") are among the world's most expensive, collectively worth more than $723 million in current dollars (though none of them come close to the record $300 million that Gauguin's "Nafea Faa Ipoipo [When Will You Marry?]" brought in 2015. On the other hand, George Frideric Handel and Ludwig van Beethoven were very successful composers and conductors in the 18th and 19th centuries. Handel died nearly blind and was given full state honors, including a burial in Westminster Abbey in London, the traditional last resting place of the most renowned British figures. Beethoven began losing his hearing in his 20s and was nearly totally deaf for the last 15 years of his life -- perhaps his most productive period in terms of his works' reputation; his funeral was attended by 20,00 mourners, and Franz Schubert was one of his torch bearers.
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