Mel Bochner was an American conceptual artist known for making text-based and often site-specific work exploring numerical and alphabetical arrangements in minimalist form. Since the 1960s, Bochner employed words and their synonyms in traditional painting format, at times using stencils or painting by hand. In Insult (2006), Bochner paints the titular word in white over a gray background followed by single and multi-word comparables, including “shun,” “scorn,” “flip the bird,” and “spit in your eye.” Each word is rendered in capital letters, tightly compacted and running the full length of the canvas to every margin, while the oil paint is applied with gestural drips and smudges. Bochner explained to the curator James Meyer, “In 2002 I came across a new edition of Roget’s Thesaurus. Not only did it include very up-to-date vernacular and slang, but outright obscenity as well. Because the thesaurus gets into the hands of fairly young children, that signaled a dramatic change in what is considered ‘ordinary’ language. Something had happened to the boundaries of public discourse – politically, conceptually, and morally – and I wanted to explore that.” [1]