Freudian Quip

         World’s Greatest This. Top 100 That. And these days everything must be XTREEEEME! (X-treme Jell-O, for tit’s sake….how the hell can Jell-O be extreme, unless you can bounce a car off it?)

         The more loud and ludicrous everything around me gets the more I find myself appreciating subtlty and even simple competance. The best title I’ve seen in the last two years was – no kidding - a show on PBS “Sandwiches That You Will Like.” How lovely. How pleasing. Nothing was going to blow my head off or change my world. And by not overpromising the show delivered. There were sandwiches and I would have liked them.

         The “sandwich” title almost outdid my favorite title of all time, which came to my attention two years ago when I saw the exhibit "Lucian Freud: The Painter’s Etchings," at MoMA in NYC. There was certainly a lot of lovely work in the “Nudes” section but this one, of London’s Sue Tilley napping on a comfy couch, sported the title “Benefits Supervisor Resting.”

         I fell out. I don’t think I’ve ever liked a name of a painting as much as the work, but the pairing of the soft humanity of the portrait with the harsh, soulless corporate job title was so inspired and intriguing I never forgot it and therefore never forgot the paiting. Everything, it seems, is in the details.

         And while plenty of other people are make perfectly good bucks filming and photographing young, lovely, pop-culturally-perfect naked ladies, the 86 year-old Freud (left) hauled in $33.64 million for "Benefit Supervisor," , a record-setting take for the work of a living artist. As Mom would say, “Now that’s wakin’-around money.”