An artist speaks up for his work

I took this from Kurt Vonnegut’s marvellous 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions. It’s a story of how an artist hits back when his work is mocked. The speech of the artist is a direct quote from the novel, and, although it is made by a painter, I hear Vonnegut defending his art against those who mock it. Rabo Karabekian, a minimalist artist, has painted a picture entitled absurdly The Temptation of Saint Anthony. The painting is twenty feet wide and sixteen feet high and comprises an orange stripe across a green background, something akin to the paintings of Mark Rothko. Vonnegut writes: “The field was Hawaiian Avocado, a green wall paint manufactured by the O’Hare Paint and Varnish Company in Hellertown, Pennsylvania. The vertical stripe was dayglo orange reflecting tape. This was the most expensive piece of art [in Midland City, a mid-Western city surely based on Indianapolis, Vonnegut’s home town] not counting buildings and tombstones, and not counting the statue of Abraham Lincoln in…