Art and Anticrises

Last winter, I bought the cheapest bottle of Sauvignon Blanc at the liquor store the night before I left New York for the holidays and forced myself to sit down and write because I’d been postponing it for far too long. I finished this that same night and then postponed posting it for far too long as well. I intended to say goodbye to the MoMA Rothkos before leaving New York for good (for a while?), but yet again, I ran out of time.

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December 22nd, 2025

Dear Rothko,

I intended to see you before I left New York for the holidays. I really did. 

One last MoMA visit to wrap up my art year, one last journal entry cursing you in my red Moleskine. The museum is made for the winter anyways.

I knew work would be slow this week, and I could leave the house on a weekday a bit early, arrive there before five. It’d be easy to get a bench to myself in front of you, to stare at you with frustration one last time before the calendar year ends.

But there was no time. Seems like this year I just kept running out of time. The feeling of running out of time must be one of the most painful and powerless things one can feel. I hate to have to say that I know that feeling too well. 

2025 is ending, and I write to you because for one reason or another you were a constant fixation of mine all year long. And you were not a good one. Yet, you kept popping up, in my mind or through signs, most months this year. 

The year I started Art and Anticrises, back in 2023, was also my hardest. I learned many things, but the biggest lesson was one I’ve thought about every single day since internalizing it. I used to think, “Why is this happening to me?” After that terrible year, my constant question shifted to “What is this trying to teach me?” regardless of what it was. A lover, a boss, a painting, a book. They’re all lessons. I just forget about it sometimes. 

So when I look at you and get angry about the fact that I can’t understand you the way I’d like to, that I can’t get the feeling I’d love to get out of you, that I can’t accept that you’re not what I wish you were, I ask myself the question I keep returning to. What the fuck are you trying to teach me? 

To this day, I don’t have an answer. And I hate that I don’t have one, despite all my efforts to the contrary.

I’ve tried to get answers sitting in front of your canvases, staring at them, begging them to let me understand. Trying to squeeze out of them a reaction like those in the guestbook of your chapel in Houston. Tears, a religious experience, or something in between. I’d settle for a mild tingle down my spine after a few minutes of contemplation.

For better or for worse, this year has reminded me that things come when you are not looking for them. Lately, I’ve begun to believe that it’s for the worse, though deep down I know it’s for the best. There’s an indescribable purity to the unexpected. It adds to its beauty but derails our plans when we’d rather be in steady comfort than in shock.

Deep down I know I’ll never find the feeling I’m looking for in your works if I’m looking so intently for it. That’s not the way the universe works.

I don’t understand you, Rothko. And I’m not sure that I know with certainty what it is you’re trying to teach me. But I know that, in its due time, I will. When I do, I have a feeling it’ll be one of those lessons of a lifetime. All I can do is wait, and maybe hope.

I think the main lesson life has been trying to teach me this year is to sit with not knowing. That is something I have learned largely through you, as in your literal canvases, but also through you as a symbol for different things.

I’m also learning that I don’t have to understand a Rothko in order to enjoy it. That I can sit in front of it, cursing it for hours, wishing I could make it make sense, and still fail. That it’ll speak to me when it has to. It’ll reveal itself to me when it has to. I just have to let it simmer—and learn to be okay with low heat.

I’m realizing that if something makes you want to curse at it for hours, there must be something meaningful in it that stirs up that frustration. As much as you try to deny it, as much as you try to push it away. 

Perhaps I do love the way you make me feel and perhaps I do know the value of your oeuvre, see the beauty in your brushstrokes, and appreciate the way you evoke tragedy, ecstasy, and doom. Perhaps I relate to it greatly and know it speaks to me, because what is my sentimental experience if not one as dramatic and emotional as what you sought to capture? Perhaps I’m just stuck in things being on your terms instead of mine. Perhaps I hate the idea of surrendering. Of being taken by something that I can’t tame or understand or control.

You’re one of a few things this year that reappeared in my head against my will, for reasons beyond me. 

Perhaps that has its own merit. What seems like a chance encounter almost never is one.

Yours truly y con mucho amor (la frustración a veces es máscara del cariño),

Debbie