Yesterday's post came off a little...angry. Not intended. It's nice that somebody thinks a fading C-print is worth nearly four million dollars—it should come under the category of "You've come a long way, baby." It's been only two-thirds of a century, give or take, since Ansel Adams was selling prints for $25 and Imogen Cunningham was asking $10.
And as for Cindy Sherman—why not? The salient point is merely that her picture was the latest more-or-less arbitrary object of contention amongst at least two of the Masters of the Universe. There were other such pictures before hers—more or less arbitrarily chosen also—and there will be others to come. The source of my irritability—if that's how it struck you—is merely this. You know how some of your friends will declare their political position as being some quixotic little tributary of mainstream politics? You know, brother Bill is a libertarian, Aunt Gracie is a millenniallist, that sort of thing (every vote she casts is to encourage strife in the Middle East because the Bible said Palestine has to drown in blood three cubits deep before the Lamb can return, and she'll tell you all about it in the car, when you can't get away and the gesture of clapping your hands over your ears would not go unnoticed)—well, I'm an egalitarian. You do not want to wind me up and trip the go button on that subject with me. It's not the idea of someone spending $4 million on a Cindy Sherman C-print that galls me—it's the idea of someone having $4 million to spend on a C-print that I find appalling. Wealth disparity that extreme is merely a symptom of a broken social system, one in dire need of readjustment. But for the record, all such examples of conspicious consumption get my goat equally—$70 million mansions, $400,000 cars, $80,000 parties.
I'll keep the comments to this post hidden, because we definitely don't want to waste our time today getting hot and bothered about politics (if my own allegiance agitates you, just remember that I'm not in charge of anything, and I don't get to say). I just felt I maybe owed you an explanation for yesterday's apparent dyspepsia.
Mike
