Shocking quote!!

I just read a shocking statement on Mail Art on page 71!...

"The Golden Age of correspondence art is behind our backs. The wave of unbridled creativity brought about by the first intensive exploration of the different postal formats and constitutive elements (postage stamps, rubber stamps, postcards, envelopes) has reached a peak in the late Seventies and early Eighties, then mail art mostly repeated itself with diminishing freshness. If you want to find new imaginative postcards today, you should look in the field of graphic design (e.g. the anthology Postcard) rather than in mail art publications. Trough habit and repetition, the original mail art concepts and ideas have been spread too thin, and there is a noticable lack of new ideas, recruits and ambitious schemes in the field. What can you do with a bunch of trading cards, apart from collecting them in an album?."



Shocking! What to do when you have missed the 70's-80's Peak because you where listening to music instead of mail arting, or simply because you might have walked around as a toddler those days... Do the younger and the inbetween-generations repeat the old guard or does the old guard repeat themselves, not seeing the new developments?

Shocking! Prefering graphic design (commerce!) above the good old - be it repetitive or not - cheap paper cut stamp stick draw paint trash postal objects...

Shocking! A Mail Artist who does not know what to do with a bunch of ATC's???
Build huge card houses! Wallpaper your neighbour's house with those! Cut them into faux postage! Send one forward to ME!
(and what's wrong with collecting small sized cards in an album?.. I wish people would send ME such small sized postal objects instead of those larger-than-A4 envelopes, with which we cannot build card houses and which do not fit in my ring binder albums...)

Conclusion: I LOVE the writer of this statement (I mean it!) and I would be delighted to receive just an ordinary mail art snail mail card from him!

P.S.1. Before scolding on the text above, you should read the whole article. It is worth reading!
And then you understand my huge admiration for the article's author! And then you will agree! ("p  (how the #&%  do I create a smiley on this blog??)
Cross-over rules!

P.S.2. There was life after Sonic Youth (that is: Nirvana, irl).
There was life after U2's Boy (October), there was life after the Cure's Three Imaginary Boys (A Forest / Seventeen Seconds - reviled by the early Cure fans).
Sonic Youth survived Nirvana.
U2's still alive.
I love music.
And Mail Art.

I don't want to collect ATC's.
I never listened to the Joshua Tree neither to Rattle and Hum.
The last record I bought from one of the formentioned was Daydream Nation.
Zen Arcade is older than Daydream Nation and sounds newer (er, faster)!
Now it's your turn to steal a new blog from this blog.

Changes in Mail Art

Everyone involved in mail art should read the article 'Ch-ch-ch-ch-change (and Face the Strange) in Mail Art', by Vittore Baroni, starting on page 68 of the Mail Art 1988-2008 Overview book! Also should do the ones with their heads full of nostalgia who forget to look forward. And the people who always want the newest gadgets and forget to look backward.











(And no, I am not Vittore Baroni and No, I did not write or edit the book and do Not work for Lulu). (Yes I'm a young-old person, something 'between generations' or something like that... somehow in crisis??)

Advertising this blog

Since I like this concept I advertised the blog on: http://mailartprojects.blogspot.com/ since I consider this a wonderful communication project. We will see if others pick on to this and the number of postings grow. Maybe add a kind of statistics to it. That would work

Great Idea

Well, I must say it is quite an idea to make a blog like this. As an IUOMA member I've tried to log in and that just works. What I have to say? Well, I actually say a lot on the blogs I have myself and also document all the things I say. Working as an artists using   'communication'  as the main medium makes it a very interestingh playfield the last years.