Rival small town artists are constantly buying and destroying each other’s work simply for the legitimacy that a decent frame bestows. Marcel Duchamp couldn’t craft a better example of how context creates the value of art. On a tangent, a local framer told me of a heist at a famous gallery in Madrid. The thieves cut the antique paintings from their frames and made off with the canvases while leaving behind the actual treasure. What’s the origin of that?ĬP: Thank you for asking this one. My sister is a photographer and lives in a small, beachfront town that hosts regular art shows. Local painters and shutterbugs exhibit and sell their work. But many of the buyers only want a cheap way to obtain expensive mattes and frames. They’ll pay ten dollars for a painting with two hundred dollars worth of framing and mounting, then discard the painting and exhibit their own work, using the frame, at the next art show. JW: I’m curious where the idea of the magical picture frame came from.

JW: What excited you most about the main character finally teaming up with Tyler Durden?ĬP: I’ve never bought into the binary dynamic of protagonist versus antagonist. Most people, to my way of thinking, create their own obstacles and defeats. God knows I do. Rather than watch Tom and Jerry, or Heckle and Jeckle, or the Coyote and Roadrunner battle endlessly, I wanted to return Balthazar and Tyler to the friendship they had before they’d become foes.

Fight club3