On platonic love and friendships that made artists famous

In 2012 the Museum of Modern Art in New York held an exhibition that demonstrated the ways that artists become famous through their friends, not their work. Titled Inventing Abstraction: 1910 - 1925, the show highlighted the ways that 80 artists successfully abandoned representational art for more radical aesthetics. To determine whether making friends may be more important than producing novel art, the show’s curators researched the interlinked networks between artists of those times and the effect thereof.