The 'breastworks' in the attic

May 17, 2007

Dear Rick,

Thank you for your generous donation to our art collection. Finding 30 framed pictures of women's breasts in a box on our front porch left us speechless.

Picasso had "Guernica," you have the "Breastworks."

We are fond of all your work, but these are magnificent. Wherever did you find such consistently robust models? Or did you mostly use your imagination?

Much as we'd like to line our living room with the pictures from one end to the other, that would be selfish on our part. The "Breastworks" deserves to be shared with the world.

Where would they be best displayed? Perhaps across the river at the Big Blue Martini or the Hushpuppie, where the audience pays tribute to the performance artists' breasts far into the night. We could give them to a foundation that fights breast cancer, to be auctioned off to help preserve lives and breasts. That would be the honorable thing.

We could send them to Hugh Hefner. He has dedicated his life to your subjects.

DC thinks we should keep the "Breastworks." We'll store them in the attic to be discovered decades from now by the new owners of our house when we move away or die. They'll marvel at the good taste of the people who lived here before.

By then people in the United States will no longer get their Jockeys twisted over depictions of women's breasts. They'll be commonplace. They'll be viewed as the beautiful parts of a woman's body they always have been, not appendages to be haltered and hidden.

The new owners of our house will discover that all the art was signed by a single artist. By then you'll be long dead and as a result your art will be worth much more than it is now. People will go to Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art to see the "Breastworks." Critics will dissect the mammary mania of the era your art comments on so eloquently.

Mammary fixation, they'll say, was common in America during the last half of the 20th century and a good distance into the 21st. We don't understand it now, they'll say, but back then a now-discredited psychoanalyst named Sigmund Freud posited that breasts had psychological powers over men, that breasts represented an Oedipal dilemma for men that fascinated and made them stupid.

They will point out that in other parts of the world, a breast was just a breast. In America breasts had the power to make some women famous and to make some men talk to them.

The art critics will relate the story about the artist leaving the "Breastworks" on the front porch of friends, who thanked him by preserving his art in their attic until the world was ready for it.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.