INTRODUCTION

The world is now a global village, an international society with its own emerging culture. Its basis is economic and its reality is objective. Its activity is the consumption of the material. The new society faces deep and sometimes violent culture shock as it struggles to emerge from the remnants of the multitude of old cultures. Most of the old cultures' values and symbols clash because they simply cannot coexist equally in a single world culture. The symbols thus far adopted by this culture include many of the Disney characters (such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck), the faces of such cultural heroes as Marilyn Monroe and the corporate symbols of IBM, McDonalds, Coca Cola, Volkswagen, etc.

Imagination, because it is not economic, nor objective and does not consume material, has been placed outside the mainstream development of the global village. Imagination is the environment and the tool of the artist. Within the global village artists have found themselves in 'left-field,' alone, irrelevant, and with few like-minded soul with whom to share their visions and ideas. They work in the realm of fantasy and symbols and their work is not fully valued by the emerging society.

While sensing the waning of the old symbols, artists have also discovered that the new society values their activity only in its material sense, as the production of a commodity to be bought and sold. In the global village their creations have no other kind of value. The more expensive the art object is (i. e. , the more money it can obtain on the open market) the more valued it becomes by the global society which has yet to incorporate any other understanding of art.

Artists of the global village who never adopted the economic view of reality struggle to reintroduce the imaginative into the new world culture. They have established an open and informal international network through the world's government postal agencies to exchange the results of their imagination: their works of art. They search for new symbols to unify the village. And they examine the old symbols.

One symbol they have found is the postage stamp, or rather the postage stamp format. This is one of the few existing symbols of officialdom, of authority, and of low economic value that is recognized in every nook and cranny of the globe. It is a universal symbol of a means of communication and a carrier of an unlimited variety of 'authorized' messages in the form of words, numbers, and images (or any combination thereof). It is a symbol that is used everyday and collected throughout the world. The artists of the global village have adopted this symbol and named it 'Artistamp'.

The use of this old symbol as a carrier of new symbols, new visual messages and new aesthetic discoveries lends an aura of authenticity to the creative efforts of the artists of the global village and legitimatizes their imagination within the international society.

Jas. W. Felter, Guest Curator, November 28, 1989

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