We build museums for artists we would have ignored. We canonize prophets we would have mocked. We quote visionaries whose resumes we would have thrown in the trash. The pattern is so consistent across centuries and cultures that it might be the most reliable bias in human history: we worship the dead and persecute the living.
The Painter No One Wanted
Vincent van Gogh is now synonymous with artistic genius. His name alone conjures swirling night skies, blazing wheat fields, a tortured intensity that we’ve come to romanticize as the signature of true artistry. Seven of his paintings have sold in recent years for a combined value exceeding $700 million. His influence on modern art is so vast it borders on immeasurable.
And yet the man himself died penniless in 1890, at thirty-seven, by his own hand.
Van Gogh produced nearly two thousand works in his short career. He sold exactly one painting during his lifetime — The Red Vineyard — for 400 francs, roughly $1,500 in today’s money, to another artist. He survived on the generosity of his brother Theo, who believed in him when no one else would. The artistic establishment of his time dismissed him. The public was indifferent.
He knew what was happening. “I can’t change the fact that my paintings don’t sell,” he once wrote. “But the time will come when people will recognize that they are worth more than the value of the paints used in the picture.” He was right, of course. He was right by a factor of several hundred million dollars. But being right didn’t save him.
Van Gogh was also deeply spiritual, a man who had once aspired to the ministry before channeling that devotion into his art. “I am still far from being what I want to be,” he said, “but with God’s help I shall succeed.” The establishment rejected both his art and the unconventional faith that animated it. They couldn’t see past the rough brushstrokes and the strange man who made them. It took death — and decades of distance — for the world to recognize what was always there on the canvas.
This is not simply a tragedy about one painter. It’s a pattern. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
History has shown us this pattern a thousand times, and yet we keep falling for it. We keep assuming that our era’s consensus is the one that finally got it right. That the people being rejected today are being rejected for good reason. That the unconventional voices are probably just wrong.
Some of them are wrong, of course. That’s the gamble. Not every rejected idea is a masterpiece waiting to be recognized. But the ratio of dismissed genius to recognized genius, at least while the genius is still alive, is staggeringly lopsided. And the cost of dismissal — to the individuals, and to the rest of us who miss what they had to offer — is enormous.
What would it look like to close this gap? Not to become credulous, accepting every wild claim at face value, but to become genuinely curious. To develop the discipline of listening carefully to people who are saying things that make us uncomfortable, especially when our first instinct is to dismiss them. To recognize that discomfort might be a signal worth paying attention to rather than a reason to look away.
The books will always be there. The collected works of the dead are not going anywhere. But the living voices — the ones who are right now trying to articulate something that the rest of us can’t quite see yet — they won’t wait forever. They are painting their canvases right now, and we have a choice about whether to look.
I’ve decided to start looking. To make it a priority to listen more carefully to the people around me — particularly the ones who have the courage to say things that are unconventional, to challenge the concepts and illusions that the rest of us hold onto with blind faith. Not because everything they say will be true, but because the history of human progress is essentially the history of people who were right before the rest of us were ready to hear it.
Imagine how gratifying it would be to take that leap of faith. To buy the painting from the painter who is still painting, to listen to the prophet who is still speaking, while the living are still among us and don’t yet need our devotion, but would be glad to have our attention — for their benefit and ours.