Postsecret is what you’d get if you threw a community art project in a bag with the Catholic confessional and, I’m coming to realize, added a big heaping dose of passive-aggressive behavior.It’s a neat idea, really. Instructions from the Postsecret site read:
You are invited to anonymously contribute your secrets to PostSecret. Each secret can be a hope, regret, funny experience, unseen kindness, fantasy, belief, fear, betrayal, erotic desire, confession, or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything – as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before.
The passive-aggressive comes in thusly: each Sunday the site is updated with new secrets which you have, roughly, a week to look at. Once they’re gone, they’re gone for good (or until Frank decides to replace them and then edit them into a book). Not only can you not go back and look at them at your leisure there is no guarantee that if you send it your secret it will be judged worthy enough to display.
There were two secrets at Postsecret today that echo things that I’ve been feeling lately. Since we’re only allowed to post one image as a link back to the site, I’m going to go with this one and hope for the best.
Am I the only person who debates the art directed glossiness of some of the secrets? Even before they started selecting weekly, the look of most of those cards would suggest more partially fabicated “art project” than any average jane community confessional.
Actually, no. I’ve had that thought myself which leads me to wonder how many of them are actually real and how many of them are artistic endeavor? On the other hand, I’ve got Photoshop and access to istockphoto.com and I know how to use both.
Well, he does say that “PostSecret is an ongoing community art project.” (emphasis mine)
If this was a pay site, or advertisement-supported or there was some obvious reward for those being published, I’d be very suspicious of this being art for art’s sake. The only (monetary) remuneration appears to be the book sales.
Further to his defense, he probably gets a lot of garbled, illiterate entries that wouldn’t be worth the time to scan. For a comparable example, skim the http://www.43things.com and http://www.43people.com most recently posted queues (Zeitgeist and Hasselhoff, respectively). If I had a nickel for every sub-thirtysomething whose most important current life’s goal was to Master Cleanse, Get a Piercing/Tattoo or Meet (insert famous person here) because he/she/it is “so dreamy”…), I’d have a lotta nickels.
It is unfortunate that there’s no obvious retention of past entries.