Many people enjoy art in a relaxed setting and place paintings they like on their walls whilst others will obsess over one piece of art and categorically deny that it should ever be reproduced. Painters like abstract expressionist Mark Rothko were keen to highlight the importance of their work in context and that a simple reproduction would destroy the soul of the work.

Rothko's paintings instead found themselves onto the walls of middle class America as a signal of their cultural learning but paradoxically revealing their lack of true appreciation for his work. Rothko was a deep thinker and would realise how his generation with Jackson Pollock destroyed cubism and pop art was in turn destroying the abstract expressionist movement. He famously said that eternal cycles grind on. The thought that the child must kill the father and the prince usurps the king. Rothko found this a difficult situation to find himself in and many attribute this to the increasing amounts of black found in his work as he grew older.

Rothko became obsessed with his own place in history as he reached the end of his career and was never certain where in history he would figure. Afraid that he and Pollock had killed off cubism before it was allowed to really flourish and also fearful that in hindsight people would be critical that his work was not an adequate evolution from cubism. He feared that his work was not good enough to be leading a movement.

These contradictions even within one man show everything that is good and bad about art. The ability to create and yet the fear of creating that which is not well received. Art divides and art unites in equal measures but ultimately art is nothing more than the creativity of one mind.