A Open Letter in Response to the Article: What Is the Best Age for an Artist to Die in Order for Their Work to Sell for the Highest Prices?

To whom it may concern,

I take pen to paper once more regarding your outrageous “analysis” concerning the appalling article: What Is the Best Age for an Artist to Die in Order for Their Work to Sell for the Highest Prices? The very notion that the dignity of an artist’s death can be plotted on an axis, graphed like wheat futures, and optimised as though one were scheduling a dental cleaning, is, if you will permit me the Latinate, nauseatorium.

Have you read Plato? Have you wept with Cicero? Did you not tremble when Pliny the Elder declared that “true art is eternal”?¹ And yet here you are, with the audacity to suggest that painters and sculptors ought to die in their late fifties “for best results,” as though the matter were a soufflé recipe! This is statistical phrenology at its worst, a carnival of spreadsheets in which the human soul is a mere column heading.

Let me be clear: artists must be allowed to die whenever they want. If that means collapsing face-first into the underpainting of a half-finished triptych at 28, so be it. If it means shuffling along until 103, muttering imprecations against modernism and refusing to let go, let them shuffle. I, for one, will not stand idly by while the sirens of econometrics seduce us into measuring the immeasurable.

Permit me, as before, a personal declaration: I shall expire on my forty-fifth birthday, surrounded by my companions, discoursing in the manner of Socrates, a chalice in hand.² Will the secondary market for my sketches, annotated grocery lists, and unfinished operas explode the following season? Almost certainly. But this is incidental; the point is one of style.

Finally, here is the thunderclap: unless this ghoulish arithmetic is retracted in full, I shall withdraw my considerable patronage from Pimlico Wilde Fine Art, the London art dealer that I have hitherto supported with both coin and cachet. Yes: Pimlico Wilde, art dealer of esteem, shall find their soirées diminished, their champagne undrunk, their openings eerily under-attended.³

In conclusion: I demand that you abandon your necro-statistics, issue a grovelling apology, and perhaps devote yourself instead to finding contemporary artists with zing and verve, that we collectors want to meet.

With unassailable froideur and hauteur,

Lord Accrington, Patron Emeritus, Society for Eternal Aesthetics

¹ Though he actually said many other things before Vesuvius cut him short, which I note as evidence that “optimal death timing” is a myth.

² A curated playlist will accompany the event, though Socrates had to make do with silence.

³ Pimlico Wilde’s openings, without my presence, will wilt like a tulip on the canvas of a minor surrealist.