
The Acid Aesthetic: A Brief History of Psychedelic Design - ohjeez
http://www.printmag.com/design-inspiration/acid-aesthetic-history-of-psychedelic-design/
======
api
There was a renaissance of grassroots psychedelia in the overlapping hacker
and rave culture of the 1990s. I miss that stuff.

Today's culture is disturbingly vapid. There is little in the way of either
genuinely creative counterculture or mainstream high culture. The pop culture
is five chord pop that all sounds the same and endless remakes of the same
film, and geek and fringe culture seems full of low effort meme trash and mean
spirited nihilism. It's not at all surprising that fascism has risen up in
those festering swamps.

It reminds me of the eerie artistic anticlimax that served as a prelude to
collapse in one of Lovecraft's stories about the history of a vanished elder
race. "The Cursed City" I think. Like the old ones our art and culture reached
a peak from the 60s to the 90s and then gave way to blobs scrawled in MS
Paint.

~~~
mythrwy
"The pop culture is five chord pop that all sounds the same and endless
remakes of the same film"

Hahaha. I remember lamenting about the same thing back in the early 90's.

Most of everything is always dull and vapid and so are most people who at best
are imitators. When you are there anyway. Looking back it always seems the
past was so groundbreaking and exciting. In my late teens/early 20's I wished
I could have lived through the 60's (this was in the late 80's- early 90's).
Because that was such a truly great and groundbreaking time according to the
books. Now I realize it was probably a general stifled societies with a bunch
of copycat posers growing their hair out and saying silly things they thought
were cool and taking LSD. I laugh my ass off whenever I see 90's idolizing
millennials.

Old man rant aside, there has been a pretty big cultural movement in the last
6 or 8 years. I guess a big part of it is the internet. In a way I'm glad I'm
not 23 again, what a confusing age, but in some ways I'm a bit jealous. Ah
well, I got the 90's. There were some cool times.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
In the early 1990s, mainstream pop music was arguably a broader scene than it
is now, inasmuch as hip-hop and R&B were both undergoing considerable
evolution and present in several distinct forms in the charts, rock was still
a strong force, and country music was briefly expanding to new markets.
Compare that to today when rock is dead and hip-hop and R&B have increasingly
merged into a single electronica style.

That said, beneath the surface of that pop mainstream is an incredible
diversity of music available to any listener who cares to seek it out, and we
are living in a music golden age even if we might be living in a pop culture
depression.

~~~
mythrwy
I don't even know what pop music/culture is anymore. Justin Beiber I guess?
We'll we've always had crappy commercial imitations with little artistic
value. The 80's were full of it so I listed to "real" music from the 70's (not
realizing the 70's were likely full of the same thing but only the quality
stuck around).

This ignorance of current culture might because I'm older and don't have a TV.
Or it might be that the internet has allowed me to isolate myself in my own
little bubble of excellence. And there is some great music around now. The
quantity of good stuff is mind boggling. You had like 10-15 choices when I was
young. And the mechanisms for discovery. It truly is a dream time for people
who love art and music.

------
bcks
Very brief, indeed. It left me wanting more.

In particular, I would have mentioned the explosion of independent printing
shops in the 60's. There’s a great list of counter-culture and political print
shops here:
[http://www.docspopuli.org/articles/BayAreaRadicalShops.html](http://www.docspopuli.org/articles/BayAreaRadicalShops.html)

I would also love to see more on the role of experimental, underground comics
in the psychedelic movement. But then comics are not quite as beloved by
design historians and critics the way posters are.

~~~
DanBC
If you're interested in the counter-culture of the 1960s the book _BAMN (By
Any Means Necessary): Outlaw Manifestos and Ephemera, 1965-70_ is interesting.

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/BAMN-Any-Means-Necessary-
Manifestos...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/BAMN-Any-Means-Necessary-
Manifestos/dp/0140032673/)

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/987215.BAMN](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/987215.BAMN)

[https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/BAMN_By_Any_Means_Nec...](https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/BAMN_By_Any_Means_Necessary.html?id=dHK6AAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y)

------
castle-bravo
> Nazi scientists were among the first to explore LSD’s psychopharmaceutical
> potential

I'm gonna need a source for this. My understanding is that Swiss chemist
Albert Hoffmann discovered the psychedelic effect of LSD in April 1943 [1],
and I think it very unlikely that the Nazis could have incorporated it into
their purported mind-control experiments before the end of the war.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_LSD#.22Bicycle_Day....](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_LSD#.22Bicycle_Day.22)

~~~
dreamdu5t
According to Operation Paperclip [1] part of the motivation for the US
investigating weaponized LSD was the fear the Nazis were investigating it. But
I'm not sure Nazi use was documented to the extent it was in the US, with the
CIA's MK-ULTRA program experimenting on unknowing citizens by dosing them with
LSD [2].

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Paperclip-Intelligence-
Prog...](https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Paperclip-Intelligence-Program-
Scientists/dp/031622104X) [2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra#Drugs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra#Drugs)

~~~
castle-bravo
If I understand correctly, saying that Nazi scientists were experimenting with
LSD is technically true, but very misleading. The "scientists" (read:
professional torturers) were /former/ Nazis working for the CIA /after/ the
end of the war. This source [1] states that a paper-clipped Nazi scientist
brought LSD to the attention of the CIA in 1948 (though its credibility is
suspect because it suggests that a CIA operative died die to LSD poisoning, a
highly improbable occurrence).

[1] [http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/11/what-
cold-w...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/11/what-cold-war-cia-
interrogators-learned-from-the-nazis)

