You Wouldn't Get It

Laughing At Seductively Sedating Seascapes While Looking For Dolphins

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

— Voltaire

One summer afternoon in my youth, I wandered past one of those mass-produced "art" stores nestled between the food court and department stores of our local shopping mall—the kind that sold framed posters of Monet's Water Lilies and Van Gogh's Starry Night. It was still a time when people had to venture outside of their homes if they wanted anything, a decade before the Internet funneled everything directly to the feet of people’s barcaloungers in half a day.

The art store was buzzing with an “optical illusion” exhibit of posters. Each image contained dual scenes existing in the same visual space. The first layer was the one meant to be seen immediately—a sunset beach scene, a forest landscape, a misty jungle at dawn. But concealed within these mundane images lurked the “optical illusion”— exotic creatures, hidden faces, or intricate patterns that required the observer to shift perspective, to deliberately unfocus and then refocus their gaze while releasing the obvious image from their mind.

Families shuffled from print to print, their reactions providing better entertainment than the artwork. "I see the dolphins!" a young girl would exclaim. Her siblings would squint harder, frustration mounting. "Where? I don't see anything! Just the ocean. Where are the dolphins, Mommy?" Some would never see beyond the surface image, their perception locked into the obvious, incapable of the subtle shift required to access the hidden.

The trick wasn't in manifesting the hidden, which was always there—it was in ignoring the obvious, or releasing it from one's mind so that something new could replace it. The duality of image perception and folly of an optical art exhibit serves as a metaphor for current events. Hardly a week passes now without some sloppily-scripted psyop trotted out for mass digestion, a surface image so absurd it dares you to question it—yet most still don’t even bother to look for dolphins.