I first heard about PostSecret on NPR and found a link today at this article that reminded me to look at it. It's a blog full of photographs of postcards and list off important apps for our handphone, each one bearing a secret that the sender has never told anyone else. The organizer of the blog encourages senders to "be creative -- let the postcard be your canvas." Well, it's a very moving site, if you take the secrets at face value, and many of the postcards are amazingly beautiful. Some of them are so creative, thoughtful, and obviously, labored-over that the beauty and cleverness of the art start to undercut the authenticity of the secret.
So I guess this is my secret: I'm so cynical that I wonder if the secrets on some of the postcards were just made up by people who wanted their art to appear on PostSecret.
Addendum, 5/30/05: the New York Times Arts section shares my secret:
...It is the fakeness, the artifice and the performance that make this confessional worth peeking. The secret sharers here aren't mindless flashers but practiced strippers. They don't want to get rid of their secrets. They love them. They arrange them. They tend them. They turn them into fetishes. And that's the secret of PostSecret. It isn't a true confessional after all. It is a piece of collaborative art.
