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seeking to maximise his satisfaction while taking price into consideration; Veblen's model, on the other hand, analyses the effect of peer pressure on the buying process (depending on whether the buyer wishes to be identified with a defined group or to set himself apart from it). Copeland demonstrates that the buying process varies, depending on the category of product/service (impulse purchase, considered purchase, specialised purchase); but the Baudrillard and Becker model posits that a purchase necessarily implies a series of signals. Overall, I felt myself closer to the Marshall model. Back at the office I told Marie-Jeanne that I needed a holiday. Marie-Jeanne is my colleague; together we work on exhibition proposals, together we work for the benefit of the contemporary arts. She is a woman of thirty-five, with lank blond hair, her eyes are a very light blue; I know nothing about her personal life. Within the office hierarchy, she has a position slightly senior to mine; but this is something which she ignores - she likes to emphasise teamwork within the office. Every time we receive a visit from a really important person - a delegate from the Department of Plastic Arts or someone from the Ministry — she insists on this notion of teamwork. 'And this is the most important man in the office! . . .' she exclaims, walking into my office; 'He's the one who juggles the figures and the financial statements... I would be completely lost without him.' And then she laughs; the important visitors laugh in turn, or at least smile good-naturedly. I smile too, insofar as I can. I try to imagine myself as a juggler; but in reality it's quite enough to master simple arithmetic. Although strictly speaking Marie-Jeanne does nothing, her work is, in fact, the most complicated job: she has to keep abreast of movements, networks, trends; having assumed a level of cultural responsibility, she constantly runs the risk of being thought reactionary, even obscurantist; it is an accusation from which she must defend herself and the institution. She is also in regular contact with artists, gallery owners and the editors of obscure reviews, obscure, at least, to me; these telephone calls keep her happy, because her passion for contemporary art is real. As far as I'm concerned, I'm not actively hostile to it: I am not an advocate of craft, nor of a return to figurative painting; I maintain the disinterested attitude appropriate to an accounts manager. Questions of aesthetics and politics are not my thing; it's not up to me to invent or adopt new attitudes, new affinities with the world - I gave up all that at the same time I developed a stoop and my face started to tend towards melancholy. I've attended many exhibitions, private views, many performances that remain unforgettable. My conclusion, henceforth, is that art cannot change lives. At least not mine.
    I had informed Marie-Jeanne of my bereavement; she greeted me sympathetically, she even put her hand on my shoulder. My request to take some time off seemed completely natural to her. 'You need to take stock, Michel,' she reckoned, 'you need to turn inward.' I tried to visualise the movement she was suggesting and I concluded that she was probably right. 'Cecilia will put the provisional budget to bed,' she went on; 'I'll talk to her about it.' What precisely was she alluding to, and who was this Cecilia? Glancing around me, I noticed the design for a poster and I remembered. Cecilia was a fat, redhead who was always gorging herself on Cadburys and who'd been in the department for two months: a temp, work experience maybe, someone pretty insignificant at any rate. And it was true that before my father's death I had been working on a provisional budget for the exhibition, ‘Hands Up, You Rascals!', due to open in Bourg-la-Reine in January. It consisted of photographs of police brutality taken with a telephoto lens in Yvelines; but we weren't talking documentary here, more a process of the