Francis Bacon at Met NYC

We are having my nephew James visiting from Atlanta these two weeks. At a sensible age of 17, he finally seems to embark on the initial adulthood which is sparkled by occasional conversations on the "real stuffs" and intellectual curiosity about things like art and culture. A huge leap from the hip hop/gangster culture he left behind. Yes, he wears clothes I wear now, clothes that actually fit and made by Ralph Lauren.
So among everything else, we decided to take him to NYC to see the Francis Bacon exhibition at Met. Honestly, it was a kind of selfish motive because I have been wanted to see it for a while.
Francis Bacon is one hell of a painter. Like all great ones, his painting is basically himself, his tormented emotional life, his compulsive-obsessive psychic, his addiction with love and sex, his borderline schizophrenic relationship with this world. And he did it with conviction and success, simply because he didn't take into pleasing the viewers into account. He did what he had to do and for himself, and miraculously he achieved great fame.
Many of his contemporaries found his painting repulsive and yes they probably still remain so to many people nowadays. They are tormented, twittered, fragmented, foreboding and disturbing. Yet they are also honest, naked, vulnerable and therefore endearing. They take the viewers beyond the paintings to a person's life, which reflects the ethos of our society in those particular eras.
One can't avoid the fundamental issues like religion, war, homosexuality and morality when looking at his painting. He chose to confront these issues because regardless being addressed or not, they exist, and by a large degree, they define us as human beings.
James basically "liked" the exhibition. One thing he certainly got was that the guy is weird and not all expensive art has to be eye-candy. I am happy with that. He doesn't need to understand more than that yet at this moment, but at least he witness the existence of such things, just because they exist.