Glorifying Charity

John Pavlus on designing and selling a poster to raise money for Japan’s earthquake and tsunami relief:

Let’s say I did buy one of these posters: what on earth am I supposed to do with it? Hang it in my living room like some overly aestheticized/sanitized symbol of a blindly horrific natural disaster that I had no direct experience of? Or, worse, as some sick, bragging monument to my own willingness to “help”? To be honest, the only sane thing to do with a poster like this might be to just burn the thing as soon as it arrives in the mail.

March 16, 2011