I have always liked this song. And I liked it more when I found this bar cover. I would text this video to my close fellow workers and the salespeople when I thought the moment was right, which happened several times, for reasons that escape my current logic.

I always liked the rock ‘n roll style of the Killers, and the perky beat of Mr. Brightside. And when I wanted to apply to the ARC Gallery in Chicago in 2024, I needed a theme. Looking at my recent music projects, I realized I had enough songs about lost love to build the theme “The Brightside of Unrequited Love.” I thought it was a great “hook” for this nonprofit gallery run all by women. But I forgot that although Mr. Brightside was a great song, I had never listed it on my to-do project list. Probably because of a concern over handling all those one notes measures in the opening verse. I found another theme in artworks all sung by women with the title: “Women off the wall: Their music In Sight and Sound.” That did not make the first cut. I have finally decided that , in order to use this great theme idea, I need to paint this song for a January submission for the 2026 Art call at the ARC gallery. Maybe “The Brightside of Unrequited Love” will be interesting enough to distract these girls’ attention from Art exhibitions having curated meaning. My history of two rejections for the ARC Gallery, may not yet qualify for a “first look, and listen.” And maybe a third attempt is a little desperate. But one more big push by sharpening to a dangerous point this outstanding theme game plan to better match theirs might, make a difference.

Brightside vs V
From gold halos to brushstroke halos — 700 years of a wrap.” The other says we’re just getting started.

Mr. V:
The creative arc of portraiture starts with Cimabue in the 13th century and ends with Elaine de Kooning in the 20th.
That’s it. Book closed.
Here’s St. Francis — gold halo, rigid stance, but you can feel Cimabue trying to sneak in a little humanity.
And here’s Frank O’Hara — all brushstrokes and swagger, the paint is the man.
Seven centuries, start to finish. Everything after? Just remix and reheated leftovers.

Mr. Brightside:
You’re telling me seven centuries of artists just clocked out after Elaine? Like they packed up their brushes and said, “Well folks, she nailed it — let’s just do portraits with celebrity gimmicks from now on”?
I’ll give you this — Elaine’s O’Hara is peak gesture-with-a-person-still-in-it. But you’re skipping all the splinter paths that shot out afterward — the hyperrealists, the identity-politics portraits, the painters who fuse figuration and abstraction in ways she didn’t.

Mr. V:
Sure, there were paths. But they’re side streets, not highways. Elaine was the last one on the open road before portraiture merged back into the roundabout of “things that look like other things.”
The rest? Either nostalgia for pre-Modern realism, or an art-fair flash that forgets the soul for the sake of surface.

Mr. Brightside:
And yet — you don’t count someone like Lucian Freud? Or Jenny Saville? Or even Kehinde Wiley taking the compositional DNA of Ingres and remixing it with 21st-century Black portraiture?
I’m not saying they toppled Elaine, but they expanded the conversation. The river didn’t dry up — it split into smaller, faster channels.

Mr. V:
Maybe so, but that’s not evolution — that’s diversification. You can graft new limbs onto a tree, but it’s still the same tree. Elaine was the last to change its species.

Mr. Brightside:
That’s the real fun of this — your “species change” line is solid.
Cimabue cracks the icon, Giotto and the Renaissance make it flesh, Modernism fractures the flesh, and Elaine keeps the sitter intact while letting the paint breathe like jazz.
After that? Maybe we’re all just doing covers.

Mr. V Closing Pass:
We didn’t settle it — Cimabue to Elaine and stop, or Cimabue to Elaine and keep going. But that is okay with me. The nice thing is that Mr. Brightside actually has a good grasp of art history, which is better than any conversation I have ever had with those that call themselves artists, because that fits their egos. Brightside’s ending comment I thought was also well said on this subject: Portraiture isn’t a race with a finish line. It’s more like a jazz set — somebody starts, somebody else takes it somewhere new, and when the music fades, you’re still hearing the notes.

Scott Von Holzen, Writer, Copy editor.
Mr Brightside, Assistent Editor
Mr. V, Editor and Chief