There’s a place on the web where anybody can confess what he never told. It’d be a regret, a hope, a desire or a fear. PostSecret welcomes any contribution, but only if it’s sincere and non yet revealed. The users are invited to make an artwork on topic in a postcard shape, and then sending it via snail mail to the webmaster, Frank da Germantown (Md), that update the website every sunday. The only access conditions are to be “brief, legible and creative”. In the most common definition the web log (blog) is a sort of intimate diary open to public that triggers a network of communication, a community of single persons that start to know about each other through posts and links. The weblog system has its own collaborative moderation skills, that notice, underline and expose to the public opinion socially more than ethical wrong behaviors. In the ‘confessional’ PostSecret case, the principle in force it’s the opposite: the community is made on shameful thoughts, and it grows thanks to a massive word-of-mouth. As in a weblog cluster, stucked on autobiographical and interpersonal themes, here the central theme is the human interest, the solidarity and the syn-pathos. On the other end, it’s natural to ask ourselves if there’s a narcissistic role in the public share of one’s secrets. Citing De Kerckhove “it’s not an exhibition of the self, but a relationship with the others”. Undoubtedly every post, even of truly sincere, carries an exercise of style. In the PostSecret postcards, in fact, there’s a solid artistic root, as Sarah Boxer notes, as in the most recent works by Barbara Kruger, Sophie Calle or Damien Hirst. It’s a sort of virtual Tate Modern (the webmaster have the copyright on the submitted materials. So, ‘secret for fake’? The anonymity of the artworks could guarantee that this is not the case, but the the need to express in a creative form the deepest thoughts is old as the art is.

Valentina Culatti