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By: Brian Campbell (Guest IP 70.81.30.111) on 20-07-2007 19:15

Having read your "Whiskey on the Cocks", I'll submit this comment: I find this Time Cover is a very effective cover, subliminal stuff & all. Many of your interpretations I find subjective, but I won't deny the trickery. Instead, I'll play the devil's advocate by contending that the subliminal stuff helps to make the work intriguing, disturbing, edgy, raises it above the level of the bland. Would the cover be better without it? Isn't blandness even a greater perversity? Many of the effects you describe I can't see: I see others you don't mention. The notion that this is a kind of conspiracy on the part of Time, a kind of Pavlovian project of taming the public consciousness to go against the article's ostensible purpose and make them passive consumers of liquor I find questionable. I don't know if such touches *necessarily* would have that effect. The graphic is meant to express, in a clever & ironic, and I don't deny, entertaining sort of way, the agony of addiction, after all. Did the Time editors order the artist to work in those disturbing images, to manipulate the public? I wouldn't be surprised if those effects passed by their noses unnoticed -- that it wasn't the artist simply having fun, making his graphic as effective as possible, even against their moral majority proclivities. As you point out, many legitimate artists have used such embedded symbolism with conscious intention, if only to make the work more interesting, intriguing, multi-leveled and powerful. A pollution of the public mind? What prudishness, what a moral steamroller! To those who are squeamish about these hidden penises, skulls and rats -- sinister only because we deem them so -- I say, all power to the artists. Hee, hee, hee! (Devilish laugh)    P.S. I also placed this comment on my blog.

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