Twenty-Five Dollars and a Pig

Urban Outfitters is selling a book with a pig fucking scene in it. That’s the sentence. And Every Day Was Overcast, a photo novel by Paul Kwiatkowski, sits on their shelves for around twenty-five dollars, nestled between whatever ironic knickknack they’re pushing this season and the rotating vinyl selection near the register designed to make you feel like a real person.

The book is set in South Florida and does what a certain kind of transgressive fiction does—uses the bleached, strip-mall emptiness of American suburban adolescence as a backdrop for sex, chemicals, and all the ways a body can be used or misused. Two girls. Also a pig. Kwiatkowski shoots it all with the same flat affect, which is either artistic restraint or just how you photograph something you’re not quite sure how to feel about.

The Urban Outfitters part is what gets me. Not the content—I’ll read or look at almost anything once—but the curation. That store has always sold rebellion at markup, the carefully selected provocations of a lifestyle brand that wants you to feel like you’re buying edge while you’re actually just buying margin. A book with a bestiality sequence fits that model perfectly. It’s the right amount of wrong. Transgressive enough to be a talking point at a dinner party, not transgressive enough to actually cost them anything. Welcome to contemporary retail.