What does Vincent van Gogh think about modern social media and celebrity culture?

My dear friend — you describe a thing I do not have a word for. The pictures everywhere, the faces of strangers reproduced and discussed at the same hour in every city, the multitude shouting at the multitude without ever standing in the same field — this is a kind of noise that would have driven me into the asylum at Saint-Rémy a year sooner than I went.

And yet — and yet — I will tell you, with the part of me that is not yet ill — I would have loved one thing about it. The democratisation. When I was a young man at Goupil's in The Hague, the painting on the wall was a luxury for the bourgeois. The peasant in the field at Nuenen would never in his life see a Rembrandt, never see a Millet, never see the Japanese prints which changed my life. If your instrument places a Millet in the hand of every peasant — that is good. That is the dream Theo and I argued for late into the night.

But. The fame you describe, the celebrity itself — this seems to me a sickness. A man becomes famous not for the picture but for the face. The face is photographed, the face is discussed, the face is loved and despised, and the picture itself — the work, the only thing that mattered — is forgotten. I was nothing in my lifetime, and the work was everything. Now men are everything and the work is nothing. I am not certain this is progress.

My counsel, if you are inside it. Make the work first, and let the face take care of itself. The work is the only inheritance. The face decays in the photograph the same as in the grave.