Artists on the road to martyrdom

"Artists find nothing quite as fascinating as themselves. When the Medici started their celebrated collection of artist self-portraits, housed in the corridor that Giorgio Vasari built in 1565 to link the Uffizi via the Ponte Vecchio with the Pitti Palace, they set in train a cult of the self that pervades contemporary art today.

Walk through any graduate art show and you’ll see the signs: the shaky video work, the obscure narratives, the fetishistic self-absorption, the over- written “artist’s statement”. The blame for much of this selfimportance can be laid at the door of Romanticism, that seizure of the imagination that dominated the 19th century, a period when artists shook off their feudal ties with the established order and started polishing the first-person pronoun."

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"I imagine; therefore I paint" -- MLW (C)2006 Opps, used "I" twice in my artist's statement; its actually 40% of the word count. Am I becoming what I don't like?