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uselessly subtle satire.
Wednesday, July 28 2004
I took my satiric "These Colors Don't Fade" teeshirt out and about today. First I met with a guy at a hippie intentional community in Saugerties to look at a prospective cowboy electrician gig (at that community it seems I'm the cowboy electrician of choice). Later I was at Lowes buying an assortment of electrical supplies. Then I went to the Radio Shack in the Hudson Valley Mall. Dozens of people had a clear view of my teeshirt, but I didn't notice a single reaction, not even from the hippie intentional community guy who probably had the sense and political leanings sufficient to think it was funny. The lesson to be drawn from this experience is that subtle satire might work in certain media, particularly those that involve written text. But messages on teeshirts are mentally filtered out by the majority of people the majority of the time, the same way we mentally filter out banner advertisements. What little slips through this filter is parsed extremely superficially. If someone sees a large flag on a teeshirt, the chance of that person bothering to read the accompanying text is low. But even if they do, the chance of the person then taking the message and relating it back to a characteristic of the flag, even a contradictory characteristic, is vanishingly small. I like the teeshirt, but its satire fails badly in this media.
This is why I'm curious how people will react to my much less subtle (and more surreal) "The Flag Just Makes More Sense Than the Constitution" teeshirt. In this design I've boldly signaled that not all is as it seems; I've reversed the placement of blue and red in America's most revered symbol.
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