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obryan.home.mindspring.com]
Mail-art is being auctioned on eBay, an apt opportunity to think about mail-art and conflicts among values. These postcards were addressed to the late John Dowd by many different people, including Richard C., who fakes Ray Johnson mail-art. One card is addressed to John's wife, Nancy, and to their first son, Noel Dowd, who has recently married. I will give him as a wedding present an assemblage May Wilson constructed with his action-figures, toys which his father lovingly gave to May Wilson (before Noel was finished with them, he says with mischief and twinkle). I saw Noel's brother Luke in London, so much worthiness and earnestness---a young artist who hasn't been spared much. Nancy Dowd has not been part of the picture for about thirty years. The person auctioning these postcards has bought them in good faith from an unnamed person who has had possession of them. Without the auction, that is, without a market, the mail-art might not have surfaced & could easily have been destroyed. Now that it has surfaced, I see the rights of the owner, and of the person auctioning---she responds to my inquiries in an appropriate tone, clearly a woman of good will trying both to behave correctly and to earn a living in order to survive. The total price of the 20 items is unknowable, but probably will be modest: mail-art is not likely to have a market because of the uncertainties about the supply. A few of these are "collectible" for reasons specific collectors will recognize. More than a few of these paper-objects would be priceless to me because of associations, and all of them must have a radiance because they were addressed to John Dowd, a magnanimous sparkling man who always wanted to make people happier than they seemed, and in my experience, he very often succeeded. Tragically John has died of AIDS. My ambivalence is that the mail-art spiritually belongs to Noel and Luke, but someone else has preserved it, which is a kind of labor that might appropriately be compensated. These are small sums---auctions opening at $15.00 or $22.00---but bids could raise the total cost if anyone wanted the whole set. An awkwardness for me is that because I feel that the mail-art morally belongs to John Dowd's sons, I wish I could afford to buy it and to give it to them, but even as I call attention to this auction of mail-art on this messageboard, I may increase the amounts people bid. Noel and Luke have none of their labor in these cards, they have only such rights as people decide to grant them.
To be lucid: I am grateful to the "owner" of the mail-art, and grateful to their gracious auctioner who has posted the mail-art at the address above. So here is a delightful improbable show of mail-art on-line at eBay and a personal website, definitely offering an occasion to think about collisions among values. I can be thankful to the owner and this seller, while acknowledging somber undertones because this electronic display is possible only because so much that should have been preserved has perished. In part I am writing this note to float the name John Dowd onto the surface of the history of mail-art. John was always life-enhancing, and mail-art was the better for his effervescences: Bill</HTML>
