Official Language

In chapter five of David Crow's Visible Signs I turned to page 93 and noticed a noteworthy thing: "Any value or 'capital' awarded to individuals always arises from a deviation from the most common usage. Commonplace usage is seen as trivial or vulgar."--basically one must strive for better usage of words that are for more scholarly and less general in society. We play this word game because we need to separate the powers, thus we can seek a hierarchy of social groups within our nation(s), or so the story goes. My favorite example of screwing with the system is on page 99. On that page you will find an extraordinary piece from Katy Dawkins. The piece is a plaque and it says "Liverpool City Council/Fuck You/By Order". I thought it was sheer genius because she took the foul language and fit it in accordance with the "official language" rules/laws. Another interesting set were the works of Joe Magee. On page 102 his "Renationalise" piece was supposed to be a column about winter coats, but instead he placed the winter coat ad along with a braille coding that read "renationalise" and when the editor finally figured it out, his contract was cut, hahaha, nice. Another one of Joe Magee's work had to do with an ad about hair conditioner. So he placed the image and once again used braille coding. This time it read "Thatcher Fucked Us". I really enjoy artists who push the envelope and bother editors/critics--good times.