Going back to your point about the relationship between genius and "salesmanship", TFF.

There was a piece in the paper the other day about Salvador Dali (born 100 years ago in May).

The Guardian art critic Robert Hughes wrote:

"No artist yet unborn will achieve the same kind of relation to the 21st century that he [Dali] did to the 20th. He was the apotheosis of the dandy, a now almost-extinct breed, and he grew famous through shock-effects and scandal, whose manifestations in painting no longer stir the shock-proof, media-glutted culture of our own time."

It's hard to make a break-through as an artist nowadays.

The artists who have gone before them, beginning with Dali, have trashed every code of respectable conduct there is.

I even read of an artist who painted a canvas with human feces. I assume his own because he was making his own statement. What artist would want to make a statement using someone else's feces?

In any case, no-one gave a s..t ... but I assume they made him clean up his own canvass.

If Dali were to do his famous clock again today, time wouldn't melt. It would probably defecate.

Oh, yes, and one other thing. The 'event' would probably be covered by gnats.