The Ghost of Picasso Has an Underbite (People’s Artist artwork #9)

My beloved, bluesy Hawaiian shirt had left-side shredding beyond repair. I placed it on my front room floor to take a farewell photo, but the front & center, arms-at-sides pose made the poor shirt look like he was facing a firing squad, so I moved him around, and lo and behold, he resisted on direction, flowed in another, acquiesced in yet another. He ended up looking like a cartoon profile head of Picasso with a touch of Mussolini, depicted cubistically, the shirt tags providing the whites and the beads of his beady eyes. At the top of the back of his head he seems to have hatched a spectral descendant of the Warren Publications narrator Uncle Creepy.

This is an example of ephemeral art, Friends. It existed only until, seconds after I took the photo, I picked up the shirt and dropped it in the waste-paper basket for conveyance to the dumpster. The photo not only memorializes it, though; it extends its existence digitally, and multiplies it by as many people who see this photo. It will, as popular parlance has it, live rent-free in your head for the rest of your life.