Usually the unveiling of the First Night button is one of those events that rates a big meh. You know, how radical are they going to get? The button is a utilitarian object, your $18 pass to all of the night's indoor events. The image is basically a marketing device that must be acceptable for embrace by city leaders, media outlets and children. Usually it's about fireworks and dancing and party hats. Examples from recent years are on the left. Now look at this year's button, right, by Somerville artist Scott Listfield.
Wish I'd gone to the party last night so I could have seen the puzzled looks on the faces of the local dignitaries when the button was unveiled at Brasserie Jo, during a reception for the Greater Boston Concierge Association. After pondering about it for a few minutes, though, I think it's kinda great. Because the 1960s space program once represented the bright future we're all still waiting for. Where's my flying car? Where's my jetpack? Listfield, who paints a lot of vintage astronauts, has chosen an image for the First Night of our future that comments on the whole notion of better days to come. It will be a perfectly acceptable if slightly baffling image to many. But it's actually kinda hip.
If you think I'm reading too much into this, read Listfield's artist statement. "...from Lost In Space to The Jetsons to Jurassic Park, it seems that popular culture craved and fomented this space-age perception of the future," he writes. From the vantage point of the present, the whole flying-car thing looks kinda hilarious. And yet, consider Starbucks, iPads and Kanye West. "The present is in fact a very unusual place," Listfield writes, "and it's strangest in the ubiquity of things we take for granted."
Huh. Turns out this year's button is more than a pretty picture, good graphic design, a commercial icon. It's actually art.
(The buttons, by the way, will be available all over town after Thanksgiving, but you can get a $3 discount by buying yours through www.firstnight.org.)
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