Van Gogh gives critics a finger

Van Gogh wrote to his brother,
“It is fiendishly difficult not to feel anything, not to be affected when those bloody idiots say ‘does he paint for money?’ . . . One doesn’t really care a rap, but it gets one one’s nerves all the same, just like listening to off-key singing or being pursued by a malicious barrel organ. Don’t you find that to be true of the barrel organ, and that it always seems to have picked on you in particular? For wherever it goes, it’s the same old tune . . . .
When people say something or other to me, I shall finish their sentences even before they are out—in the same way as I treat someone I know to be in the habit of extending his finger to me instead of his hand (I tried the trick on a venerable colleague of my father’s yesterday)—I too have a single finger ready and, with an absolutely straight face, carefully touch his with it . . . in such a way that the man cannot take exception, yet realizes that I am giving as good as I damned well got.”

Monument Proposal for New York City

In his poem,“The Monument,” Joseph Brodsky writes an argument for the erection of a monument, revealing only in the last word what it shall honor: the lie. All the monuments built in Brodsky’s Soviet town were lies to liars.
What monument would I propose for NYC?
A statue to the street people, who are always to be found around monuments, but never on them. The sight of the ragged drunk keeps many of us in our uncomfortable dress, running to the office after getting pressed into the train, while the homeless lounge on the benches, drinking vodka at 9 AM. We endure tough, tedious jobs that are beneath us so we won’t have to sit beneath monuments to dead men.

What would Leonardo Do?

Leonardo da Vinci said to students seeking inspiration, “Look at the crack in the wall.”
The line that the shifting earth inscribes, the short line written over a long time. Is the path our life inscribes like that, determined by the slight shifts we make in the world. We’re distracted by the wallpaper patterns that people keep slapping up, but the cracks underneath are the pattern of real things. Leonardo conveyed the depths of a persona. I suspect it’s not the depths of Mona Lisa we see, but the depths of Leonardo da Vinci.
Dick Davis writes in his poem, “Leonardo” of how the painting began to crack in the artist’s lifetime:

The wrinkles growAs if paint too
Partook of sin.