from the mouth of babes...

RougeCossette is a dedicated collection of artists who seem to agree on only one thing and that is what we are against - neoliberal meritocracies.

With media distribution channels becoming entirely controlled by public policy institutions both governmental and private that are violently imposing a white evangelical protestant morality on all aspects of western society under the guise of this neoliberal merit based social utilitarian agenda (that's a mouth full) we have decided to resurrect the "analogue" underground booklets and leaflets of our youth.

We publish classic artistic, political and social manifestos from the past, present and future. We also publish art projects, fiction, music, poetry and spoken word pieces.

Our works are ONLY published in physical form.

We do not make ebooks or digital materials.

You will find a listing in our shop of our current offerings, all free of charge. All the booklets, leaflets, flyers, posters, and other art pieces are provided to the public for FREE. However, you must actually be at one of our events or chance upon one of our partners who distribute our materials in their cafes, stores, etc. to get the stuff for free. How do you find out about these events and places? You can sign up on this website and we will let you know. Really, there is no concrete organized list, our members tend to work off the cuff, so things change all the time. Embrace the chaos.

If you want us to mail you something, you will have to pay for postage. While we can manage to make our art available for free also handling postage and running an on-line store is not what we have resources for (nor do we want to deal with any of that really!) However, we get it, you want cool art... the convenience tax is to pay for the postage and handling.

Why Free you ask?

From our friends at Bread and Puppets:

The beginning of The Cheap Art Manifesto:

PEOPLE have been THINKING too long that

ART is a PRIVILEGE of the MUSEUMS & the

RICH. ART IS NOT A BUSINESS!

It does not belong to rich & fancy investors

ART IS FOOD! You cant EAT it BUT it FEEDS

you. ART has to be CHEAP & available to

EVERYBODY. It needs to be EVERYWHERE

because it is the INSIDE of the

WORLD.

Why only physical imprints?

"The medium is the message" is a famous phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan, meaning the characteristics of a communication medium (like print, radio, or the internet) have a greater impact on how a message is received and understood than the specific content itself.

In Understanding Media, McLuhan describes the "content" of a medium as a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. This means that people tend to focus on the obvious, which is the content, to provide us valuable information, but in the process, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time. As society's values, norms, and ways of doing things change because of the technology, it is then we realize the social implications of the medium. These range from cultural or religious issues and historical precedents, through interplay with existing conditions, to the secondary or tertiary effects in a cascade of interactions that we are not aware of.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, by Neil Postman, he suggests that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, rather than by George Orwell's 1984, where they were oppressed by state violence.

Postman distinguishes the Orwellian vision of the future, in which totalitarian governments seize individual rights, from that offered by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where people medicate themselves into bliss, thereby voluntarily sacrificing their rights. Drawing an analogy with the latter scenario, Postman sees television's entertainment value as a present-day "soma", the fictitious pleasure drug in Brave New World, by means of which the citizens' rights are exchanged for consumers' entertainment.

For Postman, "form excludes the content", that is, a particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas. Thus rational argument, integral to print typography, is militated against by the medium of television for this reason. Owing to this shortcoming, politics and religion are diluted, and "news of the day" becomes a packaged commodity. Television de-emphasizes the quality of information in favor of satisfying the far-reaching needs of entertainment, by which information is encumbered and to which it is subordinate.

This is the real cause for the book bans happening in society now.

“Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.”

- Walter Benjamin.

It is no longer important whether art is or isn't when the mere act of creating has become political.