Archive for the ‘pe’ tag
The art of senile dementia
Willem De Kooning, the great 20th century abstract exressionist, noticed that he was having problems remembering things. His wife Elaine, wrote to him warning that despite his good physical health that he would soon be a vegetable. Though painful, the remark was darkly truthful. deKooning was a victim of Alzheimer’s and was going to lose his genius, his memory and his will. Yet his genius persisted allwong him to create more than three hundred works in the decade before he succumbed.
Curiously a panel of curators was establishied to determine the value of De Kooning’s contribution because his dementia should surely have impacted his genius. Even more curious was the lack of a similar inquiry in the 50’s and 60’s to evaluate the works he created as an alcholic.
The stigma of dementia afflicts all of us… rendering us as vacant as a blank canvas. The vacancy left by those lost memories means that we may wander and need assistance finding the path home. To that seeming simple challenge of remembering our address, thirty satellites circumnavigating the globe send the location of lost love ones carrying Personal Location Systems notifying caregivers of their precise location before the paint dries.