Mail art is an artistic movement whose artists are sending small-scale works of art through the postal services. It is related to Fluxus and emerged in the 1950s. As a global art movement it reached its peak in the 1990s and has remained most popular in the USA.
Artists might integrate the postal stamps and rubber stamps and franking machines in the art itself. Mail art, also known as Postal art and Correspondence art, is an oddball in marketing terms. The whole movement values creating art, but in a sense it insists on not being taken particularly seriously by the established art world. Mail artists have adopted an egalitarian ethos amongst themselves. Their method of sending each other art circumvents official art distribution and approval systems leaving out galleries, auction houses and museums altogether.
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