Letter of Resignation as Jonathan Peaché

Hello and welcome, Chicago art consumers. My name is Jonathan Peaché. I am the acting CEO, CFO of Mama Peaché’s Art Trough, and as I’m sure you know. we are catering visual experiences for tonight’s event. Because I am in front of such a vital artists’ collective tonight, a squadron of pioneering brush handlers, I thought it would be a good time to announce my resignation. (No questions now. please!)

I am opening up the leading position at the largest art-by-the-pound buffet in the greater plains region. For the first time in 70 years, a non-Peaché will guide our beauty manufacturing division. And I thought, seeing as this a multi-billion dollar position, that I should explain why I am stepping down tonight.

I am going to begin at the beginning. Mama Peaché is my great-great-grandma, and she lived in a log cabin in St. Louis, Missouri, right under the Gateway Arch, if anyone knows what that is. She and her husband Herb came upon some hard times during the Great Depression, and at the time, she did very little outside of making dry biscuits and portraits of puppies. Very few people liked her biscuits, but very many enjoyed her portraits of dogs. And Herb had just lost his job, but he had close to 8,000 portraits of Dobermans lying in the basement of the cabin. So he did what anyone would do to support his wife and housing structure; he sold art. During cold winter nights, he would put his wife’s paintings under the heat lamps to keep the paint warm, and it was during these times that he got the most customers. Something about the winter makes a starving man really want to decorate his home. And after six months of selling these, he had only about 4,000 paintings left. He had made enough money to hire a cubist who lived off of their bacon and corn scraps. The cubist brought in a modernist who brought in a postmodernist who thought it would be postmodern if he brought in a caricature artist. and as they say. the rest is history. By the end of the 1930s, Herb had 200 artists producing works in volume at 17 different buffets. Mama Peaché’s Art Trough was wildly successful, but still maintained the vision set about my great-great-grandma, a vision she called “sating the thematic belly ache.” She wanted to give regular folks striking and difficult pieces. She wanted to shock the midwestern landscape.

And I would say that Mama Peaché accomplished this task for a good long time. The Art Trough franchise produced challenging and healthy art for the everyman at a price per pound unheard of in the art world. We stayed true to our roots, and maintained our empire with the ethics of a small gallery. When I joined, I had little desire to change anything about the then 200-buffet business. I introduced art into our line as it came along, incorporating New Greek Media in our 2008 lineup, along with rotating Gifs and nudist theater. But I longed for a vaster control of the collective thought. As many wealthy 28-year-olds do, I thought I knew what was best for America.

I joined Mama Peaché’s Art Trough with the Bennet Group in 2009—The Bennet Group owns Drive Thru Sculpture and Yogurt Landscape, among other businesses—and I expanded Mama Peaché’s to a corporation of 20,000 outlets. I no longer knew the artists employed at each locale, and I no longer cared to. I hired those who told me they could sell concepts in bulk, and those who had the gallery records to back themselves up. We were hugely successful, and in the past four years, we’ve grossed more money than Taiwan. But there were some things that began to trouble me. I started getting letters from health care professionals who told of patients suffering from a mundanity that had entered their lives. People talked of an absence of visual narrative, a hole where meaning used...