Calling Alias...PICASSO...

Rock n roll daw-gee!
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"From the moment that art ceases to be food that feeds the best minds, the artist can use his talents to perform all the tricks of the intellectual charlatan. Most people can today no longer expect to receive consolation and exaltation from art. The 'refined,' the rich, the professional 'do-nothings', the distillers of quintessence desire only the peculiar, the sensational, the eccentric, the scandalous in today's art.

I myself, since the advent of Cubism, have fed these fellows what they wanted and satisfied these critics with all the ridiculous ideas that have passed through my mind. The less they understood them, the more they admired me. Through amusing myself with all these absurd farces, I became celebrated, and very rapidly. For a painter, celebrity means sales and consequent affluence.

Today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown - a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest." (Pablo Picasso, 1952)

1952 and things haven't got any better have they?

Just about to have dinner, roast duck, sprouts, carrots, roast potatoes and gravy. Now THAT's a proper work of art.

Very interesting, written in the style of Papa Hem himself. Was the original in Spanish, French or Andaluz?

Many consider Picasso's greatest work to be Guernica, created in response to the bombing of the Basque town by German and Italian air forces and ordered by General Francisco Franco as past of his "crusade for God and Spain".

Apparently, they have covered the big painting up, several times at the UN. I don't know what language Picasso was writing or speaking there - my guess is French.

Lamb and chips here, Foinavon.

You've got me sussed, Sultan!