Doug Henwood wrote: > sam gindin wrote:
'twas I, Sandwichman I am, not Sam. > >people really don't need all the CRAP > >they buy at Walmart > > I agree, but I never know how to answer the > question: who are you to > decide this, and on what grounds? I'd answer that with the question "who are you to NOT decide this, and on what grounds?" After all, we're not talking here about issuing edicts and autocratically imposing sumptuary laws, we are talking about having opinions and persuading people. Presumably, as my solipsistic students used to insist: "everyone is entitled to their opinion." That is, they're entitled until it begins to involve conscientious deliberation or non-conforming integrity. Only superficial opinions are welcome -- opinions that can be instantly formed and discarded by listening distractedly to commercial messages or media commentators. Going beyond that amounts to arrogance, self-righteousness, outright hubris. It is tantamount to interfering with other people's right to hold superficial opinions! But, really, I think lecturing people on the non-necessity of crap is boring and I'm against it on principle. And it's possible to be superficial and anti-crap at the same time. Adbusters strikes me that way. It was a tension in Situationism, too. Is there a solution? I am fond of a comment in a letter to the editor of an art magazine in the 30s from Eric Gill: "This solution business is, in my opinion, much overdone. It is rather a mark of false systems than of sound ones that they can be all planned out and 'offered' beforehand." What I do may appear to be more of an aesthetic than a strategy. I dress up in an erstaz "nineteenth century" outfit -- frock coat, top hat, waistcoat, poetical bow tie -- and I top it off with a sandwichboard. And off I go to into the marketplace on a secret mission: "to educate the image creating medium within us to see dimensionally, stereoscopically, into the depths of the historical shade." What I imagine myself to be doing is confronting the novelty of the commercial message at its origin in the early 19th century as a walking billboard. And people do seem to recognize what I am doing as simultaneously novel and anachronistic. At any rate people enjoy the performance whether or not they 'understand' it. And I understand it. The Sandwichman __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
