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It’s easy to dismiss the phenomenon of fandom as a largely adolescent and (therefore) inconsequential activity: girls and boys animating their molten identities—and libidos—by pining after pop singers and movie actors and athletes and television stars. But the moment before we decided to focus on the idea of “Fans” for this issue, we realized that fandom is one of the defining forces of the Information Age. Never mind the vast economies that fandom powers (Hollywood, Bollywood, and beyond). Media-enabled, long-distance, overwhelmingly one-way love—not just of entertainers, but of political, business, military, and religious figures—drives history. Consider that millions of people today routinely organize their lives around devotional behaviors (whether buying an article of clothing endorsed by a football player or committing hideous acts of violence out of love for some charismatic figure); it’s clear that the human propensity to |
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adore celebrated strangers infuseslife with a hundred different flavors of stupidity and sadness, hope and joy.
We hope that this issue captures at least a couple of dozen of those flavors. What are we fans of? Anyone who, in some way, makes his or her little piece of the planetmore beautiful or fair or interesting or fun. As the tagline on the cover says, COLORS is “a magazine about the rest of the world.” It is produced by editors and designers lately based in Italy, but, with this issue, once again headquartered in New York City, who take an emphatically global view of life in 2004. Toward that end, we have correspondents and photographers around the world, and publish three bilingual editions—English/Italian, English/Spanish, and English/French—for readers in 30-odd countries. And we’d love to hear from you, whoever and wherever you are.
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KADIOGO PROVINCE, BURKINA FASO, 1998
Fans at their team’s African Cup of Nations game
against the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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PHOTO BY GUY LE QUERREC |
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