Good Old New York Sarcasm.

 

Right hip in need of replacement and all, my wife took me to the Met this afternoon to see the wildly heralded exhibit, Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350. The show featured about eighty paintings--many which though they were meant to be cited near each other, hadn't been displayed together literally for centuries.

I'll admit, I am such a creature of advertising that it doesn't take me long to find an advertising point in almost everything I see and do. It's an ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny affect of mine, and I really don't seem to be able to help it.

Of course, you can't see a show featuring European art in the 14th Century without considering the Plague, or the Black Death. Yersinia Pestis, the bacterium that causes the plague, leapt via flea from rat to people. And from people to people. When it inexplicably dissipated (though it returned with regularity) roughly fifty-percent of Europe's population had died. Florence, Italy didn't achieve its 14th Century population again until the 19th Century.

As I was going through the exhibit, I noticed the explanatory cards listed the dates the artists being featured were active. I first noticed Simone Martini, 1315-44. 29 years. 

I said to myself, hmmm, life expectancy was shorter then. He might have died from the plague, yet he had an active 29 years of a career. That's longer than most advertising creatives get today. If you start at 25, most people are long-gone 29-years-later at 54.

I let that sit until I got to Bartolo di Fredi. He was active from 1353-1410. 57 years. If he started at an agency at 25, he'd have worked until he hit 82. Talk about a Divine Comedy. 

Imagine an 82-year-old in an agency today. It seems half the people are 82 months old.

Then I got to the Lorenzetti brothers, Ambrogio and Pietro. They had 28-year careers. So, if they started at 25, they'd have made it to 53.

I end my myopic look at the exhibit by looking at Lippo Memmi. He was active from 1317-1356. 39 years. If he had started at an agency at the age of 25, he'd have lasted till he was 64.

I was about the oldest man standing when I got shit-canned at Ogilvy in January, 2020. Just as the Covid plague was descending. At that point, I had been active for 36 years.

That's when it hit me.

Despite the Black Death, the life-expectancy for creative people was longer in the middle ages than it is today, in a modern holding company agency.

You could have had a longer career in 14th Century Siena than in 21st Century New York.

Oh, in case you're wondering about the small figurine at the top of this post. It's by Pietro Lorenzetti, who was active from 1320-1348. 

It's called "Man of Sorrows."

I can't relate.