From the moment art ceases to be food that feeds the best minds, the artist can use his talents to perform all the all the tricks of the intellectual charlatan.

Most people today can 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 understand them, the mire they admire me. Through amusing myself with all these absurd farces, I become celebrated, and very rapidly. For a painter, celebrity means sales and consequence 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, Remembrant, 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 then it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest.”

---Pablo Picasso