Shouting

A recent visitor to the Resonance exhibit decided to use his or her own fat sharpie to respond to the sentence prompts on the walls. I wasn't there, but I saw the results today. It looks terrible. It looks like shouting. If I were a letterer in a comic book, this is how I would indicate a person who couldn't control the volume.

If these panels are metaphors for a public discussion about the arts, is this an indication of what can happen in a real discussion? Someone shouts? Someone, intentionally or not, makes his or her ideas louder than others? Should I simply let this go, because, hey, "This is what a discussion in real life might sound like?"Perhaps I should even feel a little bit of pride that the exhibit managed to recreate that aspect of real-life.

Or am I the director of a show? There is a significant element of performance to this show. Angela and I have talked about this. Are we not directing this space and the performance inside? Is the show called Cacophony, or is it called Resonance? Don't I have the authority to administer the hook or kill the lights if the plan begins to come apart?

I'm not asking for comments on this one readers. For me it comes down to intention. If this person intentionally wrote responses to be louder than everyone else's, than I will simply continue to wish upon them--for the next few days in which I purge this frustration--a short-lived mild flu or temporary skin rash. Petty, yes, I know. But man, that marker really hurts the aesthetic of the panels, and the world doesn't exactly need more blowhards these days. If this person made a mistake--people have been making all sorts of funny aesthetic missteps in this exhibit--I'll simply smile and hope that people still feel like buying a few of these panels anyway.

Of course, there's no reason why someone who buys a panel can't simply remove this response and replace it with another.

And, I'm also reminded of another saying that goes something like this: the arguing and the hand-writing is never so intense as when the stakes are so low.

As obnoxious as it is, I think the ugly marker stays up.