问答题 Although art historians have spent decades demystifying van Gogh’s legend, they have done little to diminish his vast popularity. Auction prices still soar, visitors still overpopulate van Gogh exhibitions, and The Starry Night remains ubiquitous on dormitory and kitchen walls. So complete is van Gogh’s global apotheosis that Japanese tourists now make pilgrimages to Auvers to sprinkle their relatives’ ashes on his grave. What accounts for the endless appeal of the van Gogh myth? It has at least two deep and powerful sources. At the most primitive level, it provides a satisfying and nearly universal revenge fantasy disguised as the story of heroic sacrifice to art. Anyone who has ever felt isolated and unappreciated can identify with van Gogh and hope not only for a spectacular redemption but also to put critics and doubting relatives to shame. At the same time, the myth offers an alluringly simplistic conception of great art as the product, not of particular historical circumstances and the artist’s painstaking calculations, but of the naive and spontaneous outpourings of a mad, holy fool. The gaping discrepancy between van Gogh’s long-suffering life and his remarkable posthumous fame remains a great and undeniable historical irony. But the notion that he was an artistic idiot savant is quickly dispelled by even the most glancing examination of the artist’s letters. It also must be dropped after acquainting oneself with the rudimentary facts of van Gogh’s family back ground, upbringing, and early adulthood. The image of van Gogh as a disturbed and forsaken artist is so strong that one easily reads it back into his childhood and adolescence. But if van Gogh had died at age twenty, no one would have connected him with failure or mental illness. Instead he would have been remembered by those close to him as a competent and dutiful son with a promising career in the family art-dealing business. He was, in fact, poised to surpass his father and to come closer to living up to the much-esteemed van Gogh name.无