We get mail!

A postcard from the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts turned up in the Riddled tea-room, held to the beer fridge with an amusing fridge magnet in the form of an animated drag-&-drop spider.






We're not really sure what is going on here, but it is probably Allegorical, or even Anagogical, because it used to be OK to paint ladies who are over-supplied in the breast department as long as they were symbolic of philosophical abstractions. The other side of the coin was that you could not paint philosophical abstractions, for fear that people would see them as symbolic of ladies doubly-cursed with multiple boobies and a wardrobe malfunction.

To put it another way, the paintings of Rubens with their rich visual language and political subtexts were what Baroque audiences read over coffee in the morning, where today there are Day-by-Day strips. Such is progress.

Personally I interpret the lactiferous lady as representing The Welfare State, while the delapidated old dude beside her represents the Liberal Sense of Entitlement; both have been humbled by the Ineluctable Logic of the Free Market, who is not visible in this truncated detail. Which is just as well because no-one needs to see Milton Friedman without clothes.

On the other hand, Zombie J. G. Ballard reckoned that she symbolised "the polymastic mushroom cloud of the Priscilla test, the Ephesian Diana icon of the post-Hiroshima media marketplace, her multiple mammary outgrowths holding out the promise of regression and oblivion". On the prehensile tail other other hand, he was talking shite, and judging from the tide's-out state of my akvavit supply he's been self-medicating embalming again.