Drip paintings as hyper realist memento mori? A salad days preserved for years, preserved by "photography's inherent embalm and morbidity." Argument: "But youth should be wasted, sloughed into bogs of our own autumns. Instead [salad's] preservation, feeling always like photography flexing its own ability to do so, holding its pearl while we are like strapped to dying animals, timers and all. Like Imhof's Faust, subjects are forced into becoming advertisements for themselves [for painting], for the thing they cannot hold onto but [art] gets to reap." So you get your big abstraction, at a slight remove, and the humility flies upon it. They're vanitas, all art temporary, your Pollock rots, attracts vermin. This will all spoil! But only in representation. "Dutch vanitas were also a means for the wealthy to signal their humility through ostentatious displays of said humility." The joke is you get your cake and display a humble cake too.