I was going to send in my post card, but since I posted it here, I guess it is no longer a secret. Saves me some postage, anyway.

POSTSECRET is a blog of scanned in post cards (maybe they use something like my cool hp scanjet 4600.) People mail their homemade post cards anonymously, each one with a secret written on it. Having people make their own cards avoids copyright problems (which I probably have here) and works as a natural deterrent to phonies. Avoiding fakes is important because the true attraction of the site is its high reality quotient.

Browsing the cards you come across a sprinkling of the humorous and the obvious, but most of the cards contain some fact that would really put a hole in the story the author has built around themselves in their everyday life. Such frailty of the human condition has an appeal that cannot be denied.

I think we like to see the struggles and failures of others. Whether watching a car wreck on the side of the freeway or seeing a celebrity get fat, pregnant, divorced and bankrupt in line at the super market. It might be a misguided side effect of Competitiveness, i.e. if someone is losing, we must be winning, but I have not seen any studies to support this. One thing I have seen is that reality shows prey on this condition like the mosquitoes in my backyard come after warm blood. Putting people in zero sum games and goading on the subsequent blood bath is formula in this genre.

Someone like Howard Stern might get a lot of heat for this sort of spectacle, but his shows seem at least somewhat organic and free flowing. Worse to my tastes are shows like Survivor in which the players are programmed (in the Jim Jones sense of the word) and manipulated into the desirously ugly behavior. On those shows we get a double dose, with the actors going at each other’s throats and the producers putting their thumb on everyone. POSTSECRET falls more in the emergent/raw side in its production, but I have to argue against its claim to being art.

At the risk of limiting by defining, I see art is an individual’s filter on the world. It is the expression of one interpreting the condition of the rest. Art can, even in its most raw and detailed form, provide an abstraction to a larger view. Each post card on its own can stand up as art, but taken together they are something different. Together, they are just too real.