Laurent Millet

Laurent Millet, Le Petite Machine Littorale, 1999

Somewhere between the photograph as work of art and photographs of works of art lies the work of Laurent Millet.


Laurent Millet, Bestiare, 2003

In its formal rigor and subjective whimsicality, what could possibly be more French?


Laurent Millet, Les Zozios, Petit Rouges, 2006

Yosemite

What Was I Thinking?

Piggies

Is there some general and historically valid principle that would explain what we read in our newspapers each morning?

There is, and it is this: those who have money will do whatever is necessary to keep it. (I say money, not power, but they're readily convertible.) Welcome to plutocracy, the guiding principle of which is pigginess. Nothing could be simpler.

Pigginess should not be confused with conservatism. Conservatism encompasses a number of ideologies foreign to pigginess, including patriotism, religion, and the family. Pigginess embraces only the ideology of property. That is not to say that pigginess and conservatism are not tightly linked. Or that pigginess does not make use of conservative ideologies when it suits it to do so. But they are not of its essence.

The principle of pigginess has corollaries, of which the most fundamental is that the personal freedom of others, in almost any imaginable manifestation, is a threat to pigginess.

Pigginess has great explanatory and predictive power. Consider, as a proxy for the news of the day, any day, the key decisions rendered in its most recent term by the United States Supreme Court. Each is explained - and could easily have been predicted - by the principle of pigginess.

It was no surprise, for example, that the court upheld federal legislation criminalizing a form of abortion. Although pigginess has no interest in any right to life, sex without fear is anathema to it, as is every form of freedom except freedom of ownership. Thus, the court also held that a high school student had no right - the First Amendment notwithstanding - to display a banner advocating "Bong Hits 4 Jesus." And rightly so. The unrestrained spread of sex and bong hits could only undermine the fearful rigidity on which pigginess relies.

Corporate power, on the other hand, is pigginess's best friend. Why? Corporations are legal persons, but persons without even a trace of soul. Like the real persons with whom they align, corporations have money and wish to keep it. To that end, corporations constrain those they employ to act, if at all, only in the interest of their own economic well being, which is usually indistinguishable from that of the corporation, and thus of pigginess.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the court this term saw fit to impose a more difficult burden of proof on investors who believe they have been defrauded by a corporation than the corporation would face if it sued the investors. Or that it reversed a century's worth of precedent making it illegal for manufacturers to impose minimum resale prices on retailers, thereby belying all that sanctimonious bullshit about free markets. Or that it invalidated a campaign finance law restricting corporate contributions, the principal means by which money becomes power. None of this is new, of course. In the gamble of American life, the deck has always been stacked in favor of corporations.

Law and order, also, are essential to pigginess, just as criminals - poor ones, anyway - are inimical to it. Thus, on the one hand, the court held that a driver's rights were not violated when the police rammed his car, severely injuring him, although he was suspected of nothing more than speeding. On the other, it held that a missed deadline in a criminal appeal could not be excused even though the court itself gave the inmate's lawyer the wrong date.

Pigginess is not interested in race. As a practical matter, though, it's important to maintain an underclass that even (or especially) poor white people can find solace in looking down upon. To that end, the court invalidated voluntary integration plans in Seattle and Louisville, effectively holding that taking race into account to integrate schools is no different from doing so to segregate them.

Meanwhile, much of the world starves. And war, that solution for so many piggy problems, goes on.

What's to be done? Nothing, I would guess. But when that paper hits the doorstep each morning, and you brace for another day's news, don't forget the piggies. They're what it's all about.

Where She Lived

Where She Lived

Falling Man

Richard Drew/Associated Press 2001

"I don't know this America anymore. I don't recognize it. There's an empty space where America used to be."

Don DeLillo, Falling Man

In this new book, DeLillo returns to the spare, intensely laconic style that characterized his work before popular success softened and then bloated it. Not surprisingly, the reviews were mostly negative. (Evidencing, with those recently of Pynchon and Banville, only a continuing decline in critical taste.) Don't listen to them.

What Was I Thinking?

(Don't look now, but I'm pretty sure that's Jesus in the fireplace.)

John Szarkowski 1925-2007

John Szarkowski, Young Pine in Birches, 1954

Money

William Eggleston, Untitled (Memphis), 1970

This photograph recently sold for $245,000.


Helen Levitt, New York, 1980

But you can get this one for $12,000.

What could account for that disparity? Simple. Marketing. And the fact that the venal clowns who run the real world also run the art world. Consider, for example, this statement by Tobias Meyer, head of contemporary art at Sotheby's:

"The best art is the most expensive art because the market is so smart."

See? A real neocon. Next, Sotheby's will feel compelled to declare war on Iran. (Or would, if there were any antiquities left to loot.)

(For an interesting discussion of the marketing of these pictures, read Amanda Doenitz's article in the current Art on Paper. And check out Sotheby's new MasterCard, through which you can get, among other must-haves, "a helicopter tour of the California wine country with a Sotheby's wine specialist." Hmm. Pretty cool. And such an efficient use of your valuable time.)

Here's a fitting thought on this most patriotic of American holidays:

"After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it has generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return."

Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays, 1950