Greeting cards are art. They are mass-produced, but are sent just to you; the sender is only “thinking of you.”
Greeting cards line my shelves and walls like artwork: a dog with a toilet joke from my sister, scoops of my favorite ice cream flavors falling from the sky from my parents, eight reasons my grandmother loves me (written by a copywriter), a joyful Yom Kippur message from a well-meaning Christian relative, a “drink up, it’s ur bday” from my hometown friends. The people who gave me these little works of art were loved ones who knew how much I would enjoy them.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Aaron Ahuvia, a University of Michigan-Dearborn marketing and U-M-Ann Arbor Art & Design professor and leading expert in non-interpersonal love, described the impetus behind gift-giving and gift-loving.
“You’re dating somebody, and they give you some sort of a present, a nice decorative item, and you are happy to display it in your home and you really love this item,” Ahuvia said. “And the two of you break up … you are gonna like to get rid of it … the object really was a reflection of the kind of relationship you had with the person.”
A card that carries a message, even one not written by the giver, reflects the giver’s love. It’s a preservation of that love forever — a reminder, a preserver and a keepsake.
This is an interactive piece — click through the slideshow to reveal the inside of the card.
In Britain, Valentine’s Day cards have been a pure expression of love, adorned with lace, flowers and paper embellishments, since the early 19th century. These cards were far too expensive and time-consuming for the middle and lower classes to access, restricting these handcrafted expressions of love to the upper echelons.
Then, in 1849, love began its oddly beautiful commercialization when Massachusetts entrepreneur Esther Howland created a Valentine’s card assembly line. She made elaborate pieces from scratch pairing ornate illustrations with ribbons, silk and lace. The business soon expanded to New Year’s and birthday cards, as well as May baskets. Howland became a multi-thousandaire while spreading love and well wishes with beautiful handcrafting.
Louis Prang, the so-called “father of the Christmas card,” also began selling cards in 1875, selling a reported five million yearly by 1881. Prang held design competitions for artists to share their work and Christmas wishes on a large scale (and receive a high payout for winning). Participants included artist John La Farge, architect Stanford White and designer Louis Comfort Tiffany. Designs varied in whimsy and fun, solitude and celebration. The cards of the early 20th century reflected each artist’s message but were personal to the card giver and receiver.
Ahuvia described the earliest conceptions of art as “the creation of something beautiful that exists purely for its decorative or beautiful effect.” Early cards were sold on the market but were certainly works of art. The new world of greeting cards allowed the American public to give something beautiful to their loved ones. No longer did they need delicate handcrafting skills or extreme wealth to spread love and happiness in a tiny envelope. The emerging world of greeting cards created a new art form with infinite possibilities — and put it into millions of hands.
In 1910, the Hall brothers, Joyce (J.C.), Rollie and William, began selling their greeting card designs out of two shoeboxes in Kansas City, Mo., and grew in size until their business caught fire in 1915. They reopened in 1917, intending to further the personal, intimate nature of letter writing. This meant selling cards held within envelopes and cards that folded, rather than the traditional open-faced cards. This allowed for surprise messages and longer love notes hidden behind a card’s cover.
During World War I and II, people turned to the card’s short, sweet letters to wish others well across the world. The business, later named Hallmark Cards Inc., took off. In “Hallmark: A Century of Caring,” J.C. Hall said, “Many more men became permanent buyers of cards than ever before. And I saw something else in the custom — a way of giving less articulate people, and those who tend to disguise their feelings, a voice to express their love and affection.” Anyone who could not express the extent of their love in their own words could do it through someone else’s art, whether for the holidays or an everyday occasion.
Greeting cards had become art for the masses — which meant it was no longer considered art.
According to Ahuvia, if something was created not out of “inspired desire” but to “communicate something or create demand for the marketplace to make money, that disqualified it from being art.” This has now begun to change, he said, as “that idea of art disqualified a lot of things that are important to non-elites.” This leads to populism, he said “not in the political sense,” but regarding popular music, art, sitcoms, greeting cards, “The Bachelor.”
“These could all be taken seriously,” Ahuvia said. “I like the democratic spirit of that.”
Be it “The Bachelor” or a cheesy valentine, populist art represents the popular conception of love. It expresses love through common, widespread imagery, humor and far more whimsy than a long love poem or romantic play. The art of the greeting card, while far from “elite,” is made more beautiful by the messages of love it can spread and the sheer volume of love and joy the “mass-produced” art can spread, regardless of class or taste.
In 1932, Disney and Hallmark united for one of the most subtly influential business deals ever, irreversibly corporatizing the somewhat personal greeting card industry while creating a new market for children. The Disney cards now allowed parents to give cards their kids would love and cherish. With Mickey Mouses and Disney princesses, the cards connected to more than a moment in time or a simple message — they depicted kids’ favorite characters and stories of a single year. As technology progressed, cards became a new form of pop art. New, whimsical elements adorned cards for children and adults alike, including complex pop-ups, musical cards, light-up embellishments and mechanical cards.
Greeting cards also became a new form of comic, hiding humorous greetings and wishes in their new, joke-style Hallmark Shoebox Greetings line. While not the most advanced humor, this artful, subtle humor has reached millions of homes and hearts since its conception.
Corporations, like art, forever transform our beliefs, for better or worse. They shape our knowledge of holidays and form our emotional ties to them.
“If something is created by a corporation, for the purpose of making money, it doesn’t feel authentic,” Ahuvia said. But does that lack of authenticity stop us from loving something?
“Santa Claus was this little elf-like guy, like the rest of the elves,” he said. “That’s how he fit down through the chimney. … But for some reason, Coca-Cola decided that Santa Claus ought to be this big, jolly, rotund person.” Corporate and commercial art, even that created to draw us toward a product, forever changed our conception of Christmas, creating a warm and friendly character for people across the world to know and love.
Hallmark’s cards have become synonymous with holidays much the way a chubbier Santa Claus has. But they also began to diversify. In 1962, Hallmark introduced a line called “Mahogany” for African American consumers that celebrated Black culture. They created multiple lines for people of different races and backgrounds, as well as (formerly noncommercial) Jewish holidays and, later, Muslim holidays. As corporations continue to attempt to attend to diversity, we must consume products with the awareness that mere virtue-signaling is insignificant and not all holidays are made to be commercial. Cards only have meaning when they are sent to spread a true message.
Nonetheless, as greeting card retailers expanded their reach, the industry’s cultural impact became hard to ignore. More holidays became “Hallmark Holidays” — commercialized holidays, even those with non-corporate origins promoted by corporations. These include Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, two of the largest days for greeting card retailers. These holidays’ intense commercialization may take away from their genuineness, leading people to put material goods over personal effort. But the days are important in allowing families to celebrate one another. Greeting cards, and the holidays the greeting card industry proliferates, speak to a love for our parents, even if just for a few days. While commercialization may have taken away from the original ideas of these holidays, replacing them with floral arrangements and ties, the cards themselves hold meaning and deliver messages of love and appreciation that we otherwise would neglect to deliver.
Ahuvia explained the constant struggle between art and the commercial sphere. In the 20th century, “art wasn’t necessarily seen as something that needed to be beautiful,” he said. It was something “designed to provoke a thoughtful or emotional or aesthetic reaction of some kind.” Greeting cards can be art based on this definition. The aesthetics of a greeting card reading “happy brieday” or donning a glittery beach landscape may not be exceedingly thought-provoking, but they impart a personal reaction for every recipient. They change how we perceive the world and the things we love.
With the rise of email, text and customizable Instagram stories, greeting cards may seem like the next analog fallout. But the industry is undergoing a revival. According to a Marie Claire article on young consumers “saving the greeting card industry,” millennials and Gen-Zers were Paper Source’s largest consumers of greeting cards in 2021.
In the article, Etsy executive Dayna Isom Johnson shared that people prioritize greeting cards because they are an escape from the technology that has taken over our lives. Paper messages feel all the more special. The article interviews retailers from around the country who, like traditional artists, share messages important to them. Victoria Venturi owns Paper Epiphanies, which sells cards for divorces, Mother’s Day cards sent to and from mothers, and sarcastically biting cards for daily life.
Young people value cards for more than special occasions. They celebrate cards for their craftsmanship — younger people are more willing to spend on intricate designs and handcrafted creations and for personal messages of love applicable at any time of year.
“We’ve found that eight out of 10 millennials keep the cards they’re given because they are so important to them as capstones of a relationship,” Lindsey Roy, Hallmark’s chief marketing officer, told Marie Claire. Though I cannot verify this statistic, it makes me feel less weird for cherishing greeting cards as much as I do. Disney iconography, sarcastic millennial jokes and overwhelmingly ornate pop-up cards spill out of my drawers like clothing, adorn my surfaces like office supplies and line my walls like wall art.
By investigating how people value different types of “art,” Ahuvia recognized that cherishing an item has its limits.
“In a real culture of connoisseurship, knowing what’s good … is a really important source of pride and source of identity,” he said. “I’ve talked to a lot of (people) about things that they love and they say ‘I sort of love it but I don’t really love it.’ (I ask), ‘Why do you sort of love it?’ ‘Why, I sort of love it because it was a gift from this person that was really good … But I don’t really love it. Because it’s not really much.’”
When Ahuvia talks to “people who are less elite in terms of education, they’re not as picky. If something was given to them by a friend or someone who really means something to them, they’re much more willing to forgive the object itself if it’s really not perfect.” The silly cards we keep — overweight Santas and bad jokes and Mickey Mouses, overbearingly red roses and glitter and mass-marketed love poems — are all artwork. And this art can be beautiful, funny, kind, thoughtful — even if they are created for the mass market. We should never criticize art solely because of its wide appeal, especially if it (secretly) appeals to us. Though thousands of people may have the same birthday card, they mean different things to every receiver. If art is intended to impart personal reactions, greeting cards are the purest form of art.
There is a reason we get so excited to open mail. We may initially only pretend to read a card before “noticing” the birthday money folded within. But greeting cards should be cherished. Money isn’t the only thing kept in a card — a moment in your life, a reflection of love, a displayed understanding of you and appreciation of your humor from a loved one is too. Call me a hoarder or an art curator, but I am never getting rid of my greeting cards.
Senior Arts Editor Kaya Ginsky can be reached at kginsky@umich.edu.