Angst for dummies …

… Francis Bacon Breaks Art Auction Record | New Republic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

There is nothing surprising about an artist feeling like a romantic outlaw, and Bacon and his supporters can cite a long tradition of more-or-less alienated creators, winding back to Caravaggio, who actually killed somebody. The trouble with Bacon is that he has not attached himself to a tradition of picture-making but to a tradition of attitudinizing. In this wrongheaded tradition, Caravaggio is admired not because he was a good painter but because he was a bad boy—which is a pretty accurate characterization of the career of Francis Bacon, too. This is not to say that artists are under any obligation to be conventionally respectable members of society. The fact is that an artist's outward behavior has no fixed relationship to the development or the value of his or her work. But to accept this fact, which really ought to be self-evident, one must accept also the freestanding value of art, an idea that today is devalued when it is not entirely rejected. The Bacon mystique is not grounded in his paintings so much as in a glamorous list of extenuating circumstances.