![]() “Intriguing paper designs,” it says, “make LSD especially attractive to junior high school and high school students.” The DEA counters that sort of talk in a draft report on LSD. “The fact that people quite lovingly spent time on these designs suggests to me they’re after more than just money.” “It adds an element of trust, so that when you take LSD you know the people who made it took an extra step,” says Rick Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Assn. Drug Enforcement Administration has counted more than 350 designs since blotter art began appearing, although collectors say there are as many as 1,000 designs floating around.īecause the manufacture of LSD is so underground and illegal (the DEA estimates only a handful of people make all of the acid in the world), hardly anyone knows who these anonymous artists are or why they do what they do. A popular design depicts Beavis and Butt-head in rock-on mode. To this day, that tradition has continued. The first designs were indeed iconographic-Mickey Mouse in his “Fantasia” outfit or a spoof of the FBI seal. ![]() “They’re fairly worked out iconographic concepts.” “There’s this real strong connection with Pop Art,” says New York’s Kastor. Experts say the LSD makers commissioned the art from graphic artists who had little or nothing to do with the drug-making itself. The art appeared as LSD manufacturers went from selling liquid and sugar cube forms of the drug to placing it on perforated paper that looks like a sheet of small stamps. “But now the manufacturers are giving me undipped sheets, so I don’t have to go out on a street corner.”īlotter art first appeared sometime in the early ‘70s-likely 1972, say Lyttle and others. “You go out on a street corner and you buy a hit, you figure out what a sheet looks like, then you buy a sheet from there,” McCloud says of his collection technique. One thing collectors will emphasize-despite McCloud’s enthusiasm-is that most of these artworks are either undipped work or the acid that is so old that its psychedelic properties have wilted away. These signed sheets follow the success of similar art commissioned by Greenpeace and the Albert Hofmann Foundation-signed sheets that were auctioned for charity. The only difference between these and the originals is that they will be “undipped”-sans LSD. “Signing blotter art,” Leary says, “I feel like the Pope signing communion wafers.” “It’s got value as art.”īay Area author Thomas Lyttle has commissioned six reproductions of classic ‘70s blotter art that he will have signed by people such as Leary, William Burroughs and Ken Kesey. ![]() “There’s a collector’s market developing,” says Jacaeber Kastor, 40, former owner of Psychedelic Solution Gallery in New York. ![]()
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