Can

One tries to leave one's comments on Andy Warhol's "Campbell's Soup Cans" (1968) on the Times Online weekly Arts site but can't because it has broken down.

Warhol can't even get his lettering aligned properly, losing it particularly on the "TOMATO".

Nor can he quite get the perspective right, on a simple cylindrical object, viz a soup can.

No doubt this all has its meaning, in the peculiarly silly American way which H. Melville popularised with his stupid whale book ("Moby Dick", 1851).

This is an appalingly bad book about the Nantucket whale fisheries (obsessively about the Nantucket whale fisheries), written at best in a kind of overblown prose remniscent of a "club" chair in the mausoleous foyer of a now-defunct investment bank, shiny burgundy leather with studs sunk six inches into it and which no human being was ever supposed to actually try to sit on - combined with the rotten cod Shakespeherian* necessary to convince the punter that it is Arrrrrrrrrt and meaningful &c.

Which is why, for me, the ticky box on the Times Arts Commenty Box Thing carries such intense pathos.

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*In particular with anything to do with 1st Mate Starbuck, after whom your cup of hot liquid cardboard is named. Really. A tad ironic given that the original of Moby Dick may have been the whale Mocha Dick. See? It all fits.