Geiger Counter

We’re popular in Florida   When my daughter was in kindergarten, one of the myriad forms we were asked to fill out by the school district signed her up for a limited liability company that has no community or government oversight. They market our own daughter’s artwork to us, and I don’t believe we will ever be free from them.  You know those wild, unique, tacky-but-beautiful pieces of art that kids bring home to their parents to hang on the fridge? The ones that bring a tear to your eye, the most beautiful creations on the planet, if-and-only-if the little person who made them is your direct offspring? Well, this is a company that makes money by selling reproductions of those pieces of art to you. Even worse, they also put all of them online, so that they can live side-by-side along with the cultural wreckage that is the Internet, rather than on the relative safety of your refrigerator, where you hardly ever have to see people arguing about politics or calling each other “idiots” or “commies” or “fascists.” I had no idea what I was signing up for when the school’s art teacher urged us to do so. I kind of assumed it was something generally related to public education, or actual art, or perhaps it was just another reminder to write our daughter’s name on everything.  But for the past two years, my email inbox has been bombarded with marketing from them, nearly all of it pleading with us to give them money so that we can have plates or cups or t-shirts or dog collars or yachts with her artwork on them. It is a grim exercise in modern living.  I have no idea how they stay solvent. After all, we live with the actual artist. If Van Gogh were eating pancakes at our breakfast table, and all of his original paintings were available to us, it would be difficult to convince me that I should open up my wallet and pay for a print of “Almond Blossoms” on a keychain.  The problem is, this company has us in an impossible situation. I adore my daughter’s paintings and sculptures. They are, and I say this without exaggeration, some of the most wonderous things I have ever seen. But I love them, not low resolution replicants of them online. Plus, while I love them, I possess the modest amount of self-awareness necessary  to know that parents are horrible judges of their own children’s artwork. There are 8 billion people on the planet, and I am literally the one least able to decide whether or not Hadley Geiger’s drawing of a five-legged giraffe is good art. To me, it’s better than Paul Gaugin’s “When Will You Marry,” which sold at auction for $300 million a few years ago. But realistically, I’m not sure I want to wear it on a T-shirt and force the general public to look at it when I go to the grocery store. It’s aesthetically pleasing for deeply personal reasons, but I suspect it is the type of aesthetically pleasing that should be displayed in the privacy of our own home.  Of course, I cannot reach out to the school district, or the company itself, to tell them we would like to leave this commercial media ecosystem, because doing so would make me seem like the kind of terrible parent who is not supportive of a small child’s artwork. It’s legitimately an impossible spot in which to be.  Since I cannot ever be rid of them, I can at least make fun of the whole idea, which is certainly the next best thing. Doing so requires research, so I looked into the company. As previously stated, they essentially make money by aggressively selling children’s artwork to the parents and grandparents of those same children. The company was founded, not by artists, or even by people who were art-adjacent, but by people who worked (surprise, surprise) at a marketing firm. We all know that marketing firms are the richest organic soil out of which great, intensely personal works of art grow. It all began, according to the company’s website, with one of the founders looking at a co-worker’s child’s “masterpiece” – possibly the most liberal and creative application of the word ever – and thinking it would be better if it were online. I was not there, but if I had been, I would have pointed out that hardly anything is made better by being online. If the last year of lockdowns and quarantines have taught us anything, it’s that in-person things are always our first choice, and their online equivalents are only to be used when deadly diseases, or perhaps wars or alien invasions, force us to hide in our houses.  One benefit of the past year’s online schooling experience is that our daughter has created all of her artwork in our own home, where we can safely and freely – I mean two things simultaneously when I use the latter word – enjoy it. And yet somehow, this company is still sending me sporadic emails asking if I would like to see, and, well, give them money, to look at a picture of my daughter’s latest macaroni necklace. They even did their best to make money on the pandemic, trying to sell me facemasks with Hadley’s artwork on them during a special Christmas sale. They actually tried to sell us magnets featuring her artwork. If we had bought them, we would have used them to hang the original versions of that same artwork on our fridge. It’s all incredibly meta.  Judging by their website, they are incredibly popular in Florida. It seems like that’s where many of their testimonials come from. This is often referred to as a “red flag.”  “We’re quite popular in Florida!” should never be anyone’s slogan. Ever. That’s like saying your products sell well in Mordor. I used to live in Florida, so here is a list I compiled of other things that are popular there: Methamphetamines. Taking off all your clothes and getting in a fight in a Chick-Fil-A parking lot. Crashing your lawnmower into a cop car while drunk. Burning down your own house because you think vampires are in it. Taking off all your clothes and getting in a fight in a Steak ‘n Shake parking lot. Calling the cops on your wife, who is a spider. Getting maimed by your pet alligator more than once. Climbing onto a giant inflatable swan and then accidentally almost drifting all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Thinking you are calling your drug dealer, but accidentally calling your mom and telling her you want to buy drugs.  Some of these were news reports I read, but several were things I personally witnessed. Florida is the only state in the U.S. where a sheriff’s department can post a message online offering to test the quality of meth for dealers before they sell it, and have it turn out to be a viable trap that actually leads to arrests when drug dealers bring their drugs to the station for testing. I lived in Florida in the year 2000, which many of you probably remember as the year we learned that Floridians did not possess the physical strength or mental acuity to properly vote in a Presidential election.  I think Wisconsin is a lovely place, but in all honestly, I lived in Florida before I came here, so my bar is probably set fairly low. If you were continually punched in the face for five years straight, being punched in the arm all the time would seem relatively pleasant. Perhaps this is my lived experience. Who knows? In any case, I was unsurprised to learn that the company is very popular in Florida. It was very on-brand, for both them and the Sunshine (and illiteracy) State. I believe Florida proclaims itself to be the illiteracy state on its license plates, actually, and that Florida is misspelled.  Incidentally, Dave Barry wrote an entire book about Florida and how funny it is. He’s much funnier than I am, and a much better writer, and much more famous. He won a Pulitzer. But I like to think I’m smarter than he is, because he lives in Florida, and I don’t… anymore. That is a sentiment I would gladly pay to have printed on a magnet and stuck on my fridge.