Replies

I'm sorry, but I think it is the height of poor taste to write an article that basically trashes the entire youth of an area of several million people at the very same time that hundreds of school kids are conducting candlelight vigils for their fallen classmates who've died in Iraq, without at least one throw away sentence for those who've fallen.

The piece is making a point about a certain irresponsible subculture, not about all the people of a certain place. he could have placed it in just about ANY big city in the USA. He chose Orange County. good as any other place. but, in your hypersensitive CA identity, you missed the whole point.

It's art. It's like poetry. One takes the greater meaning if he is capable. See what happens when children grow up without art?

"Bobby, honey, look at the pretty picture. See all the colors?
"Ahhhh! Ahh, Ahhhhhhh!"
"OMG! What's happening?"
"I'm sorry, ma'am. Your son doesn't seem to have an imagination."

It's good that you mentioned art, since I was an art major in college and I've been a professional designer for over twenty years. Now in visual arts, as I'm sure you know, there is something called composition and its two main parts, positive and negative space. How the composition is arranged is vitally important to how it is perceived. Usually the positive space is predominant, but what is left out is often as important. Also, especially in representational art, there are often themes and sub themes, patterns, symbols, and the like.

Written works can be similarly described, using "positive space"- what is written- and "negative space" -what is left out. They are also usually themes and sub themes, and variations in characterizations. The terms "wooden characters" and "cardboard cutouts" are often derisively used to label inferior works that use stereotypes devoid of shading and complexity.

I cannot ascribe content to the author's work where it does not appear. In this case I read only one theme, with no hinting at sub themes or contrast, other than the obvious. I see only broad brushstokes, with no subtelty to shade the characterization of the youth of Orange County as shallow, spoiled, and self centered.

Perhaps if he had used irony, as in a few words to contrast the kids who've died and their grieving families to the carefree youth he uses so many to document, or symbolism with a line about how the scene is repeated in communities around the nation, the connection can be drawn. But no such mechanism is provided, so one is left to judge as the piece is written.

Unless by art you mean finger painting where you can read into it whatever you want.