Artist Obituaries - What Will Yours Say?

The final paragraph, about artist obituaries, in a recent blog post, Google-eyed, by Hazel Dooney in her Self vs Self blog set my mind to thinking in the warped way that it does. First the paragraph in question:

As anyone who reads Self Vs. Self regularly would know, I'm a total media tart. I embrace any opportunity to promote my art and myself. Barney writes: "I subscribe to Brendan Behan’s view. He famously said, 'There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary'." I wouldn't even draw the line there.

I can imagine the obituary of some poor starving artist including a paragraph along the lines of:

"In loving memory of __________. If you had just bought his art while he was alive he might have been able to afford the expensive, life saving, medical attention that he urgently required. Unfortunately it was not to be and he died penniless. Buy his art you bastards so we can afford to pay the funeral bills!!"

More fun than obituaries is the statements people choose to have written on their tombstones. Perhaps an appropriate one for our starving artist is:

"This will increase the value of my art!"

Or even more appropriately:

"Now's the time to buy my art!"