On the 24th February, 2009, I listed one of my first T-shirts on Red Bubble featuring a modified photograph of mass murderer, Ivan Milat, with the ironic statement, Australians Just Love Backpackers
The item has currently had 459 views over one-and-a-half-years, and maybe one or two sales. It’s not my best work, and certainly not by my own estimation, my funniest, but there is a certain underlying bitter irony to it, which makes a tasteless joke somewhat pertanent when considering that Australia is one of the largest destinations for back-packers in the Southern Hemisphere.
Skip forward to June 2011 and suddenly someone with a personal axe to grind has taken it upon himself to target a considerable number of my works with the same complaint. This person, who calls themselves Critical
Australians Just Love Backpackers
has no profile listing or any body of work to speak of. So here we are again, reliving a tried and tested old argument that every art or literature student goes through in first year college, and we at RB have done to death over matters such as the Hipster Hitler issue. One tasteless joke does not a biggot make, and humour is humanities way of dealing with social and psychological ramifications of issues which effect us. When Bin Laden was shot, everyone was telling jokes about it; when Princess Dianne dies in car accident, it wasn’t long before people were telling howlers; there is hardly an event which takes place that doesn’t at some stage invite humerous scrutiny – whether this is insensitive to the direct victims of the issue, or not. Backpackers have never been my area of focus, and I don’t think will ever be. I spend more time poking fun at god, and he doesn’t seem to get all that upset?
So to my friend “Critical”, whoever you are, please drum up as much publicity for me as you can possibly muster. It will raise my public profile and hopefully my product sales.
Cheers!
Darren Stein
Steven Guy
Hang in there Darren, I too recently came under attack for a certain t-shirt of mine and due to the controversy it went from obscurity to 5,000 views and 14 sales in a matter of months.
At first I took issue with those who complained but then I just decided to let it roll. I know that I am still in a happy place with the work and stand by it as a political piece.
Darren Stein:
Thanks for the advice, man.
Steven Guy
All cool
BYRON
just wait… the conservatives will be asking for all nudity to be removed from RB soon!
TextureoftheSin
I can’t say I like that t-shirt and I do find it confronting………mainly because it causes me to remember how much pain that man inflicted on his victims and their families. I am not sure whether that is such a bad thing. Just confronting.
Please tell me its not on baby clothes :O
Darren Stein:
The truth is I don’t remember. As I said, I put it up a year and a half ago and may have inadevertantly listed it on baby clothes, which is easy to do. I wasn’t making a political or artistic point. Either way, people just need to ignore it and not buy it. If you type in “killer” under the search option you get material which is far worse than a fuzzy photo of condemned man.
TextureoftheSin
Its not baby clothes and I apologise because it sounded like I was accusing you….I needed that emoticon to have a wink on it.
It appears the outrage in the media over your art work is that it was available on kiddie clothing….which its not.
who-knows
It was available as kids clothing at the time the news article emerged. If you didn’t change the setting I guess someone from RB admin unticked the kids clothing option when they saw that news article.