Random Opinions ranjeet on 24 Oct 2007 07:01 pm
A Suspicious Secret
Lately, I have found myself fascinated by PostSecret. For those not familiar with the concept, it started as a community art project for Artomatic, a “Multimedia Art Event”. The founder, Frank Warren, asked people to anonymously send in their secrets on postcards. The only rules were the that the secrets needed to be truthful, and they needed to actually be secrets. He has turned this into four books, the last of which just came out. While the books contain many secrets, a small number of new secrets are posted every week on Sunday (but no archive). The secrets themselves range from banal to funny to haunting. Psychologically speaking, I can see how sending an anonymous secret could be liberating, especially some of the darker ones you see.
One thing I am always struck by is how complex and artistic the ones that get posted are. I may just be underestimating either (a) the secret-having public’s artistic abilities or (b) the sheer number of entries Mr. Warren gets in. Maybe he gets 3,000 a week (i.e. 0.001% of the population) and only ten need to be awesome enough to make the cut. But I sometimes wonder if he just makes them up himself. You know, write a program to randomly generate secrets, spend a lot of time cutting out newspaper clippings to create a suitably jarring, edgy effect, etc. Maybe my suspicions will be answered some day when he himself will post his own secret.
Could I come up with a secret to send in? Probably, but I’d feel like a doofus because it’s just not as haunting or poignant as the ones that make it in. I mean, I would just feel like a crybaby if my deep, dark secret is not shocking enough to make the front page.