By now, most of us have heard about the grilled-cheese sandwich that just over a week ago sold for $28,000 on eBay. The sandwich, according to the Florida lady who put it up for auction, was made 10 years ago, and she stopped eating the amazing piece of food when she noticed its grill markings miraculously depicted the image of the Madonna.
Over a decade, the sandwich - kept in a plastic case that is not airtight - did not, according to the seller, sprout any mold or deteriorate in any way.
Twenty-seven real bidders eventually bid the sandwich up to $28,000 from its starting $3,000, though there were also dozens of fake, retracted bids, some of them offering as much as $3 million.
The eventual winner was, perhaps not surprisingly, a casino that plans to take the now-famous holy sandwich on tours to be viewed by a nation whose residents have barely caught their breath from watching Mel Gibson's controversial "The Passion of The Christ."
This kind of story seems like great source material for a satirist. One could write an irony-filled story in which "The Passion of The Christ" movie ends up being the most illegally downloaded film on the Internet, after which a wave of grilled cheese sandwiches-bearing holy images nets hundreds of thousands of dollars on eBay. Problem is: These stories already exist in the evening news. With each passing day it seems that the satirical imagination is at best just a short step behind reality, and at worst completely losing the competition for our attention.
Chris Bachelder, in an enlightening article from the October issue of McSweeney's The Believer, wrote on this very issue, saying "we are actually living in an age when satire is increasingly untenable because satire relies on clear distinctions between real and absurd, in between core and surface, and those are not distinctions we can easily make anymore.
"It is difficult (and hardly worth the effort) to make fun of something that is already a completed joke. The culture now does the work of the satirist."
Not only does a story like this show us how absurd reality is becoming, it also shows us how we, as a culture, eat up these real-life narratives the same way - perhaps even with more vigor - we once ate up good fiction and satire.
Perhaps an expected parallel lies in the fact that reality television fills the same time slots once filled by shows like "Dallas" and "Dynasty."
The story of the Madonna in a grilled-cheese sandwich is captivating also because anyone has the potential to become part of the absurd narrative. Just as the format of the online auction is inherently interactive, so is the public's involvement in the writing of this story.
And $28,000 for a 10-year-old piece of food is quite an ending.
Once a story gets this much attention, perhaps it's safe to say that such notoriety gives the object in question a legitimate worth, much like artwork. It's as if the mass focus of our attention remains with - or within - the thing, thereby making it precious.
What also makes the grilled-cheese sandwich resemble an artwork is how, like so many artistic icons, is inspires the creativity of others. If you search now for grilled cheese on eBay, you'll find six pages of items related to this bizarre auction item. Some brashly acknowledge assumptions of fraud, selling pieces of toast with images of Elvis or Bart Simpson scorched on the surface. Others are more complex and conceptual, such as a painting of the Madonna eating a grilled cheese sandwich that has an image of herself on it.
But again, despite making an attempt at tongue-in-cheek irony, these items can't escape becoming an integral part of this reality-based satire. Ultimately, like the original grilled-cheese relic, all of these items are at last intended to generate money through eBay.
For those interested in getting a little closer to this story on their own (I assure you that reading the original item description will be worth your while), the eBay item number for the now-legendary sandwich is #5535890757.
Missoula artist Ben Bloch's column appears regularly in the Entertainer. Reach him at BBloch4775@aol.com.
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)