Nobody has ever loved a poster

I’ve owned a lot of posters. I couldn’t tell you what happened to a single one.

That isn’t really a criticism. Posters are cheap, they cover a wall, and when you’re nineteen in a rental painted the colour of porridge they do an honest job. But I’ve moved six times now and I have never once carefully packed a poster. They get rolled up, put in a bag, and then quietly not unpacked.

Here’s what I think is going on. A poster is someone else’s work that you’re displaying. You didn’t make it, you didn’t commission it, and there are forty thousand identical copies of it. It shows a preference. It isn’t really a possession.

The frame problem

There’s a practical bit too. A poster looks cheap until it’s framed, and framing it properly costs more than the poster did. So most of them live in limbo, stuck to plaster, curling at one corner, very slightly crooked.

You can spend eighty euros framing a fifteen euro print, at which point you’ve mostly bought glass.

What survives a house move

The things that make it to the next flat tend to have a person attached. A photo somebody took. A print bought on a trip you remember. Something a friend made badly. The common thread isn’t quality. It’s that the object is connected to someone.

Mass production is the entire point of a poster, so that’s the one thing it can’t do.

I’m not going to pretend a brick mosaic is fine art. It’s a grid of plastic squares. But it has the property a print doesn’t: you sat down and assembled it one colour at a time, and your evening is in there. Nobody rolls that up and puts it in a bin bag.

The texture thing

One more point that’s easy to miss until you see it in a room. A poster is flat, so light does nothing to it. It looks the same at 9am and 9pm.

A brick panel has a few millimetres of relief, so every stud catches light differently as the day moves. It reads as an object on the wall rather than a rectangle of ink. Photographs undersell it, which is inconvenient for us and quite good in person.