Angry Aesthetes

[IdleRich]

The Marvel backlash. The criticism of the Netflix sheen.

My hatred of Marvel stems more from its all-conquering ubiquity. It's the one thing where "if you don't like it, just watch something else" is not a valid point - cos there is nothing else. The directors who should have been making their own independent films have been sucked into a corporate black hole and forced to make Thor or whatever instead, same goes for actors and even other resources.

For eg, apparently that Irish film from last year, The Banshees of Inisherin was supposed to have a couple of spectacular dream sequence scenes but basically Marvel had used up all the CGI and so there was literally no CGI left to use in that film. And anyway if there had been any to spare somewhere they wouldn't have been able to use it cos all of the engineers were busily working on The Avengers: Infinity Films with no Endgame.

Average cinemsa here in Portugal has like fourteen screens and thirteen of them have a Marvel film, the other one is out of order but they're working on it day and night so grown adults can find out what happens to Ant Man.

Depressingly I read about this paper produced recently by The institute For Studies which concluded that these days kids quite literally (in the old sense of the word where it tells you that the sentence is a true, actual description with no metaphor or approximation involved) only watch TikTok porn and Marvel, they did an experiment where they showed kids other films and the answers they got back were things such as "I don't understand it, which one is the superhero?" and "where are the leotardS?" etc

It gets worse though, cos the Important Research Foundation have been examining the brains of people who watch Marvel and they've concluded that anyone who has, through their own volition, seen more than three Marvel films has serious issues with the parts of their brain that control taste and thinking. There needs to be more research, at the moment it's not clear if being dumb makes you watch Marvel films OR watching Marvel films makes you dumb. If it's the latter it's pretty scary cos they are creating their own audience by giving them brain damage - and there is no twat in a skirt pretending to be a Norse god coming to save them...

Anyway, got a bit carried away, but the point is, with Marvel it's not really the aesthetics I object to.

 

[IdleRich]

LEDs

What about em?

 

[shakahislop]

What about em?

people hate the way that LED lighting looks. by people, I mean red scare dasha and that article titled 'why is everything so ugly now' in n+1. ie some nyc americans hate them for aesthetic reasons. but its more grumbling than it is shock

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

It's because the LEDs can be switched to doomsday offensive death flash mode that activates neuron-shredding vaxbots, or so I'm told

 

[Mr. Tea]

people hate the way that LED lighting looks. by people, I mean red scare dasha and that article titled 'why is everything so ugly now' in n+1. ie some nyc americans hate them for aesthetic reasons. but its more grumbling than it is shock

Ultra-bright LEDs have far more blue in the spectrum than older kinds of artificial light such as incandescent bulbs or sodium vapour lamps. This has the subjectively unpleasant effect of giving everything they illuminate all the ambience of a hospital morgue, as well as fucking up the circadian rhythms of humans and all manner of wildlife.

But they use somewhat less energy that other light sources, and are therefore "green", sigh.

 

[shakahislop]

Ultra-bright LEDs have far more blue in the spectrum than older kinds of artificial light such as incandescent bulbs or sodium vapour lamps. This has the subjectively unpleasant effect of giving everything they illuminate all the ambience of a hospital morgue, as well as fucking up the circadian rhythms of humans and all manner of wildlife.

But they use somewhat less energy that other light sources, and are therefore "green", sigh.

see i told you

 

[Mr. Tea]

see i told you

Yes, but it's worth grumbling about.

 

[IdleRich]

people hate the way that LED lighting looks. by people, I mean red scare dasha and that article titled 'why is everything so ugly now' in n+1. ie some nyc americans hate them for aesthetic reasons. but its more grumbling than it is shock

Oh right, I didn't know that, but I quite like the way that LEDs look.

 

[IdleRich]

Though when I say that I guess I mean I like LED displays, maybe I wouldn't like a room lit by an LED. Until I've knowingly witnessed that I'll forbear from expressing an opinion though I know some of you think that's a crazy way to behave.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Though when I say that I guess I mean I like LED displays, maybe I wouldn't like a room lit by an LED. Until I've knowingly witnessed that I'll forbear from expressing an opinion though I know some of you think that's a crazy way to behave.

You know those awful, blueish, obnoxiously bright headlights that a lot of modern cars have, that dazzle you when you're driving at night, even when they're not on full beam? Imagine those, only as street lighting.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

This thread is inspired by a number of famous stories about audiences being angered and shocked by modernism... off the top of my head

1. Audiences being so enraged by the confrontational something or other of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and the Firebird Ball that they apparently rioted, ripped up seats and literally attempted to grab every bit of modernism they could find and stuff it forcibly back into its box.

2. I heard that during filming of Taxi Driver (I think it was that, the anecdote came back to me cos Liza re-watched it the other day) there was a bit where the director wanted DeNiro to walk around the car in the garage, while the camera stopped looking at him, then left him altogether and went the other way around the car before finally meeting up with him on the other side. But apparently, at first anyway, whatever Scorsese said, the crew flat out refused to do it. As far as they were concerned there were rules to filming and doing that would break them so they wouldn't maybe couldn't do it.

3. Somewhat similar, I think it was the British sculptor Anthony Carro who displayed his works directly on the floor rather than on plinths - with the result that this flagrant breaking of the rules drove audiences into paroxysms of rage.

4. Oh and one more that comes to mind. There was an artist (I forget who sadly) who announced to his colleagues at The Royal Academy that he planned to paint some classical battle scene, but in a moment of radical insanity that caused almost literal meltdown amongst the other members he proposed to paint the soldiers in armour and clothing appropriate to their period rather than strangely naked as was required by the rules.


Ok so all the above are examples of passionate and seemingly misguided conservatism, and they all seem pretty laughable now. But what intrigues me is that at least some of them seem like people being actually enraged by aesthetic concerns.

And I wonder if that still happens. People get annoyed cos the Mail tells them that a book is about paedos or that grant money is being given to artists who can't even paint. But does anyone ever get shocked by the aesthetics of an art work any more (as opposed to its content)? Were people more educated or more invested or was it just that there were more rules left to break?

Did art affect people more in the past? Or am I just trying to fit rose-tinted spectacles on angry philistines?

I'm not really sure what I'm saying... it's just that while a load of people getting genuinely angry about statues being on the floor is clearly a bad thing, I feel that something has been lost as well as gained in a world where that no longer happens at all.

Discuss this please, or tell me some more funny art stuff that made people lose their shit

People no longer get angry because they are no longer provoked...when was the last time Take That did a surprise support slot at Cafe Oto? When did Grooverider last drop Groove Armada? When did Taylor Swift last perform a concert facing the wrong way? When did Celine Dion last read out her lyrics rather than sing them at her residency? When was the last time you heard a drill song about flower arranging in waltz time? Those are all just suggestions but I think they would elicit an extreme reaction.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

taking us to a kind of exhibition of cakes, which were in the shape of other things like cars or cricket bats...

This is called a 'cake shop'

 

[mixed_biscuits]

The aesthetic/content dichotomy is a false one. Unless it involves something that is cognitively offensive for visual processing e.g. high contrast repeating patterns for migraineurs, the aesthetic offence is all to do with meaning i.e. just more content.

 

[version]

People no longer get angry because they are no longer provoked...when was the last time Take That did a surprise support slot at Cafe Oto? When did Grooverider last drop Groove Armada? When did Taylor Swift last perform a concert facing the wrong way? When did Celine Dion last read out her lyrics rather than sing them at her residency? When was the last time you heard a drill song about flower arranging in waltz time? Those are all just suggestions but I think they would elicit an extreme reaction.

Sam Smith dressed up as The Devil and did some weird piss video and made a bunch of people very angry.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

The trail of destruction that I began two pages into Edmund Davie's Lights (when the realisation that the novel had an index had finally percolated through to my consciousness) has arguably not yet come to an end.

 

[Mr. Tea]

LEDs?

High-tech miniature light bulbs. They're everywhere these days, try looking out for them.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Sam Smith dressed up as The Devil and did some weird piss video and made a bunch of people very angry.

When it comes to making people angry you've just got to know your audience; believe me I know

 

[mixed_biscuits]

@shakahislop @Mr. Tea I know quite a lot about LED lighting because I am very sensitive to the flicker that plagues much of it, which can be much worse than the equivalent flicker in all previous types of lighting. As has been said the cold white LED lights also have a horrible spectrum and they can be far too bright for the space. All of these flaws are disrecommended by health and safety guidance and, by extension, probably illegal in some contexts but people generally have a strangely phlegmatic attitude to lighting and will often put up with daily headaches, dizziness, poor sleep for instance.

That said, LED lighting can be entirely flicker free (which older types never were) and can emit a good spectrum e.g. Philips eye comfort range and nearly all of the lighting in the London underground.

The scientific reason you don’t like LED bulbs — and the simple way to fix them

That flicker in the corner of your eye isn’t your imagination.

theconversation.com

P.S. this flicker is not visible but many people's brains can feel it.

 

[IdleRich]

People no longer get angry because they are no longer provoked...when was the last time Take That did a surprise support slot at Cafe Oto?

I'm sure they'd love to have a band of that size perform there but apparently Take That think they are too good to play for the type of people who go there ie honest salt of the earth types like us - the pretentious anti-art gits.

When did Grooverider last drop Groove Armada?

Why would anyone do that?

When did Taylor Swift last perform a concert facing the wrong way?

Trump's done it a few times. In fact he's gone punk as fuck full-on GG Allin... faces the wrong way, shits himself on stage and then insults the audience telling them to drink bleach and gdoing impressions of people with disabilities.

When did Celine Dion last read out her lyrics rather than sing them at her residency?

For all you or I know she did it last night.

When was the last time you heard a drill song about flower arranging in waltz time? Those are all just suggestions but I think they would elicit an extreme reaction.i

I don't really follow drill so can't comment.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

The roadman finds classical music so offensive that he can be shooed away from underground stations with piped Puccini.