Ranting and Raving, parts 408 - 411

Richard Britell July 26, 2012

408. What Buboni said in his fever: When artists die they all go to hell, and once there they find themselves in huge museums among crowds of museum visitors. They sit on little marble benches along the walls of lofty  marble rooms.

409. And in those museums their works are never shown, but only the works of their rivals. So Warhol has to look at Pollock retrospectives, and Franze Kline and Jules Olitsky meet Mark Rothko and Gorky and spend the day admiring the works of Norman Rockwell. And if the devil hears one sarcastic comment they are forced to look at Thomas Kinkade instead.

410. Poor old Picasso is locked up in the basement of the Prado, and must stay there for a hundred years or until he agrees to look only at the works of Goya, which are the only thing on the walls there in Madrid.  He admits that he likes “The disasters of War”, but he only wishes that his Guernica image would not be used on the place mats in the cafeteria.

411. Even Michelangelo and Raphael are in hell, along with Bernini and you would not believe me if I told you what they have to do there. The three of them have to curate exhibits of parochial school student’s paintings of portraits of the Pope. They have looked at fifteen million slides already, and the best picture gets a blue ribbon. Eternity will go by, and they are never going to agree, not even two out of three. These was the sorts of things Buboni was saying, but in the morning he came to his senses.