I hate Mark Rothko.

A few years ago, I was visiting the Tate Modern in London, a beautiful museum housed in a decommissioned 19th-century power station that thrusts into the sky like the Tower of Mordor. The effect was stark on that winter evening, and I felt a little overawed, but the weather was so blustery that I would’ve been happy to duck inside even if I hadn’t wanted to look at the art.

I soon discovered that the museum has a “Rothko Room,” meant to let the viewer appreciate the artist’s work in a setting close to the one he would’ve wanted. From the Tate website:

In the late 1950s, Rothko was commissioned to paint a series of murals for the fashionable Four Seasons restaurant, in the Seagram Building on Park Avenue, New York. […] However, the murals were darker in mood than his previous work. The bright and intense colours [sic – Britain] of his earlier paintings shifted to maroon, dark red and black. […] Recognising [sic – more Britain] that the worldly setting of a restaurant would not be the ideal location for such a work, Rothko withdrew from the commission. […] This installation includes all nine of the paintings owned by Tate. Perceived, as the artist intended, in reduced light and in a compact space, the subtlety of the layered surfaces slowly emerges, revealing their solemn and meditative character.

Excited? Don’t be. What these nine works actually are is a series of blobby rectangles, broken up by a stripe here and there, all layered onto the canvas by a shaky, childlike hand. Installed in the surprisingly large space – less chapel than cathedral – devoted to Rothko’s Gesamtkunstwerk at the Tate, the impression they left me with was one of having been ripped off, a bad joke gone awry. I felt violently angry and was tempted to march up to the reception area and ask for my free admission back.

Now, art that defies viewer expectations is nothing new. But Rothko built a career out of this sort of thing, and I do mean exactly this sort of thing: As the Tate blurb observes, the main difference to the rest of the work he did at this time, at the height of his popularity, is that many of those rectangles were blobbed out in rather brighter colors. Worse, Rothko lacked the irony of his fellow 20th-century radicals. He said of paintings like those in the Tate that he wanted them used as meditation objects, though the only thing they made me do is meditate on his mediocrity. It’s as if Duchamp, having hung his urinal in an art gallery, had had it rapturously received and decided to spend the rest of his life signing pissoirs for wealthy Parisian flaneurs.

So I hate Mark Rothko, that humorless jerk. But I don’t hate Markus Rothkowitz. That’s the penniless Latvian Jew whose family fled the tyranny of 20th-century Europe for the Elysian fields of Portland. In Latvia, Rothkowitz would’ve been drafted into the Imperial Russian or Soviet army, suffered a fate specific to Jews, or at best been allowed to live out a life of pointless drudgery; in America, he won a scholarship to Yale, an opportunity he promptly threw away because he was too busy organizing for the Wobblies.

An artist who never let his lack of skill hold him back from becoming tastemaker to the Mad Men, Rothkowitz moved to New York to be tutored by those better than he but was soon commanding prices in a league of his own. A self-serious showman, P. T. Barnum with considerably more mental instability but the same jowly scowl, he was in every way an American genius. And he’s still valued as such: Were the Tate to sell the contents of the Rothko Room today, they’d fetch nine figures.

Nor, shockingly, has America afforded opportunities only to Jews. Even their archnemeses, the Germans, have been allowed to flourish and prosper there. Sometimes, it only took one generation, as when Johann Jakob Astor used the money he’d made skinning furry things in Canada to build a town that’d one day pay way too much for Rothko paintings. Sometimes, it took a little longer, as when Friedrich Trump left Kallstadt to run saloons for the miners of Seattle and the Yukon. He made out like a bandit – sex sells – but it was his son Fred who really built the family fortune, investing in the same town Astor once did. (What’ll happen to Friedrich’s empire in the third generation? Well, that’s an open question.)

What would Astor, Rothkowitz, or Trump find today, immigrating – illegally, for now – to the United States to work? Portland is a lot less Elysian. Seattle is in shambles. NYC has fallen silent, and its elected leadership has decided to fix the problem not by reforming the shambolic government but by soaking the rich who are already fleeing the city. (Not to worry, though: No less a sage than Jerry Seinfeld says it’ll all be OK.) At least crossing over to Canada is still an option – oh wait, no it isn’t. Along with the trappers and saloon keepers, any number of celebrities must be devastated.

Who will exhibit the next Rothko when the only apprenticeship one can get is not in the business of art, but in grievance politics? Who will employ a Trump or an Astor when businesses go from shuttered to boarded up to looted and burned? What is someone from a poorer place to think when he looks at the “city upon a hill” and sees it vacillate between xenophobia and wild self-loathing?

I have no answers. But I do know this: I hate Mark Rothko. And I’d regret nothing more than if America stopped being the kind of place that created people I can hate.