art

“Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine,” he once said.

Wait, I'm not quite sure if I quite get what he's trying to say? Did he mean to say that rich porkies that eat at pretentious fancy restaurants would be so stupid and tasteless that they would never look up from their overpriced food to enjoy the nice paintings on restaurant walls, or that he doesn't want any ultra-rich porkies to see his art? Or a combination of both? The first reason doesn't seem to make complete sense to me; isn't one of the benefits of being mega-rich off of countless exploited workers that sometimes (and in any case, much more often than the exploited workers) you choose to spend your nearly endless free time learning to appreciate fine art? Is he saying bad taste in food is directly correlated with bad taste in visual art? Did he just hate tasteless rich people, or rich people in general?

Actually, this makes me wonder what abstract expressionists as a movement thought about the relationship between their art and their rich patrons, and whether their art reflected this in any way. I mean, was Rothko's disgust here the exception, or a widely held sentiment among his peers? The topic seems to me to be unavoidable to anyone with half a working or artistic brain; especially if, as I assume, most artists begin as starving students/apprentices/newcomers and later in their career get offered insane sums of money for their work.