The Death Of Unions (Well, Union Art)

The decline of art is as broad as it is lamentable, hitting all aspects of artistic media ... including union activist art. Here's an International Workers of the World poster from way back when, long before post-modernism came along and ruined it all:


Pretty magnificent, eh? And, yes, flawed ... like there are no up or down ladders anywhere to be seen.

But that's not the subject of this post; the decline of art is. And here you have it, direct from the IWW on-line store, the swill the IWW artists turn out today: a "Capitalism cannot be reformed" button

Did the new IWW artists ever look in the archives and study the works of those who went before? Do they even feel a challenge to create something ... uh ... creative? Art is all around us, from the museums to the buttons on the IWW site, and nearly all of it is a mere shadow of what art used to be.

Oh, and here's a crack-up: Every single button in the IWW store is temporarily out of stock! Bad management? (Heh!) Or maybe the freighter from China, with its load of political prisoner-produced buttons, got waylaid.