http://www.cafepress.co.uk/smashausteritynostalgia.1726639400
http://www.cafepress.co.uk/smashausteritynostalgia.1726639400
On the "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster:
"One
of the few test printings of the poster was found in a consignment of
secondhand books bought at auction by Barter Books in Alnwick,
Northumberland, which then created the first reproductions. First sold
in London by the shop at the Victoria and Albert Museum, it became a
middlebrow staple when the recession, initially merely the slightly
euphemistic “credit crunch”, hit. Through this poster, the way to
display one’s commitment to the new austerity regime was to buy more
consumer goods, albeit with a less garish aesthetic than was customary
during the boom. This was similar to the “Keep calm and carry on
shopping” commanded by George W Bush both after September 11 and when
the sub-prime crisis hit America. The wartime use of this rhetoric
escalated during the economic turmoil in the UK; witness the slogan of
the 2010-15 coalition government, “We’re all in this together”.
The power of Keep Calm and Carry On comes from a yearning for an actual
or imaginary English patrician attitude of stiff upper lips and
muddling through. This is, however, something that largely survives only
in the popular imagination, in a country devoted to services and
consumption, where elections are decided on the basis of house-price
value, and given to sudden, mawkish outpourings of sentiment. The poster
isn’t just a case of the return of the repressed, it is rather the
return of repression itself. It is a nostalgia for the state of being
repressed – solid, stoic, public spirited, as opposed to the
depoliticised, hysterical and privatised reality of Britain over the
last 30 years."
Owen Hatherley: Keep Calm and Carry On – the sinister message behind the slogan that seduced the nation
http://gu.com/p/4fgza/stw
http://gu.com/p/4fgza/stw
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