It is not just art critics; it is also the international art trade that gives capitalist and state-supported abstracts kid glove treatment. Indeed, the moral counterweights of consumer society are those overdue existentialist painters who, in the free world, had the courage to denounce the aspirations of a middle-class public consensus that found its most important ideals in the formation of families and material prosperity. Mark Rothko and his contemporaries were at once strange and inspiring in the North American context. They set out an agenda for a higher existence, which they themselves could not pursue due to lack of inner strength and resilience. Depression as the enforced state of mind for the artist, and aestheticisation of doubt would have in themselves been worth an admission of failure for those artists who fled to the underground. Yet it is not this dagger-thrust that gives the heroic counterculture its credibility, but the fact that the pictures painted with blood and tears are ultimately acquired by the fortune made on Wall Street, as a kind of relic or self-justification.

We see no contradiction from this distance, where these works have already attained the age of documentation. It is also clear that these works could not have been created in New York studios; studios that were built by investors. The assistants at Sotheby’s put everything in place, and in the process, we see that nothing more has been done than an empathetic attempt to define the painter against his own time. The kicking away – however impressive – and the falling back to the same place, prove that social gravity cannot be defeated by ideals – it only exercises our muscles.