The Death of American Poster Art, Governor Cuomo, and the "New York Tough" poster.

New York City was once the premier American city and it's never gotten over it.  Nor has New York state.  The Big Apple is the Big Apple to New Yorkers, but to the rest of the nation New York City is more defined, and no doubt unfairly, by 1970s vintage films like The French Connection.  New Yorkers don't realize that, and have a really strong tendency to see themselves like the The New York Times sees itself.  Leading the pack. 

It doesn't.

It did lead the pack in early Coronavirus infections, peaked early, and seems to have that under control in comparison to states that are now peaking.  There's a lot of politics and virology to that, but it's a fact, and New York is now taking some steps that it objected to early on, such as trying to keep people out of New York from high infection states. Earlier it objected to efforts to keep New Yorkers in.

Anyhow, New York is now celebrating and Governor Cuomo is doing the really odd thing of releasing a really bad poster.

I'd post a photo of the poster here, but it's likely protected by copyright and the state is trying to sell copies of it.

I like poster art, and as somebody who does, there's no denying that American poster art peaked in the 1910s, remained strong through World War Two, and has died since then.  After that new media came in and people just weren't as interested in posters and what they had to say.  Color photography became a major feature of U.S. Government posters, and while that's understandable, it just isn't the same as a good illustration.  After 1945 good poster art became the domain of rock bands and Communist governments, but rock band posters died by the mid 1970s and of course Communist governments, never admirable, largely disappeared, with a couple of notable unfortunate examples, by the 1990s. 

Some state efforts are exceptions and you'll see them from time to time, usually recalling an art style of the past.  But by and large, governments in the US don't issue inspiring posters.

New York has issued a self praising and really weird one.

I don't know enough about New York's COVID 19 response to comment on it, other than to note that for those on the East Coast Governor Cuomo came across like a hero, and to those who lived outside of that area he came across as a carnival barker.  It's one of our real regional differences.*  Now that the big crisis seems to have passed in New York, he's calmed back down and appears, to outsiders, much more reasonable.

And now there's this poster, about which he's stated:

I love history. I love poster art. Poster art is something they did in the early 1900s, late 1800s, when they had to communicate their whole platform on one piece of paper. Over the past few years I’ve done my own posters that capture that feeling. I did a new one for what we went through with COVID and I think the general shape is familiar to you. We went up the mountain, we curved the mountain, we came down the other side and these are little telltale signs that, to me, represent what was going on.- Governor Andrew M. Cuomo

Okay. . .

Well, first of all, "New York Tough" is something that's no doubt a proud self evident thing to say if you are in New York, but its not apparent to those of us outside of New York.  It's like the phrase "Boston Strong" that circulated a few years back which, to native Westerners, didn't make sense at all as Boston's response in that circumstance didn't look strong at all.  The "toughness" of New York is missing to outsiders here. 

The poster has on the top of it "Wake Up America!  Forget the Politics!  Get Smart!", but it's political.  Cuomo puts his fellow New Yorker on the poster sitting on the moon and takes a shot at him.  Maybe the shot's deserved, but the fact still is that the comment is political, and to outsiders, Cuomo and Trump both share the same really loud, brash speech characteristics that New Yorkers love to think makes them frank and honest but which to outsiders makes them appear self centered and rude. 

"Love wins" is at the top of the poster in homage to the phrase of the LGBQT community's phrase, along with the rainbow, which is political itself.  No matter what a person thinks of that cause one way or another, it's not mixed with this cause.  That's just Cuomo throwing a bone to his supporters, another political act.  The "Out of state ban" presents an irony, as efforts early on to keep New Yorkers out were opposed by New York.  Pointing out three excluded states is just snarky, as is the blaming of the infections on Europeans flying into the state.  Maybe it did come in on airplanes. There's a good chance of that, but we don't know that, and the same political forces that are generally aligned with Cuomo were critical of the ban on Chinese travel when it was imposed early on.  A fellow New York Democratic politician stated “I mean this with 0% snark: how is this not wildly offensive? This is an artful monument to death and tragedy being sold by the state. I’m legit perplexed.”

The Washington Post, in noting Cuomo's poster, also noted art critics, who termed the poster "an incoherent mess".  The New York Times, itself a bit of a mess right now, compared it unfavorable to the graphics of a Tik Tok video.

Mostly it's just really bad poster art.

Back in the early 1980s when the band the Talking Heads was around they released an album called Little Creatures that featured some horrifically bad poster art that was supposed to be profound, but in fact was just flat out bad.  It's almost as if that has returned. 

Let's hope not.
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*Something odd has happened with New York political speech in that the type of erudite clipped speech that was once common of New York politicians, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt and Nelson Rockefeller has completely disappeared.  The current crop of New York politicians, such as Donald Trump, Cuomo, and Bernie Sanders (a transplanted New Yorker) all have very odd sort of quasi street speech as their speaking style, save for Sanders who comes across that way due to his heavy Brooklyn accent. Now, every New York politician tends to sound like they're auditioning for a role in the film Goodfellas.  Sanders no doubt come by his accent honestly, but as to the remainder a person has to wonder if the cinematic trope of "tough New Yorker" hasn't bled over into how public New Yorkers portray themselves in the same fashion that the movie The Godfather actually caused an improvement in the fashion's affected by 1970s mafiosos. 

This speech pattern, as noted, impacts different people differently.  I recently had an interaction with an elderly woman who had grown up in the industrial East of the 30s, 40s and 50s and who was very much a Trump admirer.  She noted that "he speaks just like us".