Mail Art

Mail Art is more than just image-bearing mail passing along in the governmental stream. It is a person-to-person attempt to redefine our cultural heritage -- the very way we see and think and feel about the world around us. It represents a new way of relating to one another and creating our own culture, by minimizing the aesthetic and material trappings of the market economy...working with, and when necessary, against the grain of both popular and high culture... maximizing our collective human souls. --The Sticker Dude


Art is not the product of an individual, but the product of communal awareness. --Carlo Pittore


Mail art is reckless, kind, subversive, petty, reactionary! It makes mailboxes museums without walls. Artworks borne both in and out are of every origin, quality and medium. It is revolutionary, sentimental, dated (sic!), inane, therapeutic! -- Tom Cassidy


The social responsibility of the artist is to survive and to nibble away at society's thick hide with love and sharp teeth. -- Harley


Throw your net into the sky.
Be in readiness to receive.
Be in readiness to give.
When the light shines in
Your net, glow with it.
--Sheril Cunning


Art or Mail Art is not important. What we need is a coherent communication model of what we want: power, riches, glory and destruction; and/or mutual respect, social justice, ecological maintenance and well-being. --Guy Bleus


You don't make a living out of mail art
You make an art out of living --Crackerjack Kid


The Purpose of art is to make life more important than art -- the central idea of the Eternal Network. --Ken Friedman


Not everything that springs from the underground is automatically more valid or interesting than the "truth" that is generally agreed upon in official quarters. You have to travel through the networks with your mind open and your critical facilities on alert. But if you do not try this trip, you run the risk of never learning about books, ideas or experiences that may radically change your life. --Vittore Baroni


Mail art, by its very nature, is the most democratic form of fine art. Its direct exchange of creative works largely levels the playing field of main stream art, as exemplified in museums, galleries and other establishment art scenes. Accomplished (for the most part) without the direct exchange of money for product, mail art is an alternative (and therefore freeing) system of making art for art's sake, simultaneously between creators and appreciators. Mail art will exist as long as the need for art exists, as an Eternal Network with constant change in the number and diversity of participants, for as long as human society can sustain postal and electronic methods of exchange. Don't take my word for it; try it youself! With caring and daring send out your creative efforts in the mail, in the knowledge that the chances are excellent that you will be answered -- The Sticker Dude