At Poster House, a handy-sized Manhattan museum devoted to all manner of posters, ranging easily from and beyond wit, beauty, satire, elegant design, activism, and propaganda. One of the four current exhibits, Fallout: Atoms for War & Peace, is a good example. In one stretch of the exhibit, anti-nuclear weapons posters strike a viewer hard, while across the way a great corporation fills yards of wall space with beautiful images in grandly expressed praise of peaceful and war-ready uses of the atom.
The tension is a huge part of the experience. From various edges and enclaves, artists, citizens, and activists try to shape a message that will have public reach, while across the way bigger, more powerful voices try to preempt the issue with almost utopian promises.
I left my first visit feeling that society is a place of great struggle over message and interpretation, and the players are not equally provided with resources and access to audiences.
What images, words, and ideas will a society finally settle on for thinking about its problems and its hopes? What mix of reasoned discourse and propaganda will guide us? In the Poster House museum, those questions come brought right up into view.