Comment by ericmay
11 hours ago
Blame the suburbs and communism - those are the two driving factors there.
Suburbs: everything has to be standardized and made efficient for global supply chains. Private equity is just the mechanism to achieve that. Want better food and produce? Stop going to McDonald’s, Costco, and Starbucks in your Jeep Gladiator. Also need to stop wasting so much taxpayer dollars on these useless, endless highways that destroy local economies and entrepreneurship and spread us out so we are reliant on cars.
Communism: everything must be “modern”, bland, and sterile. Andy Warhol. Banksy. Tape a banana to the wall and stare at it in your all black jumpsuit. All bright, white fluorescent. Nothing out of the ordinary or quirky, no individuality, all chains, all the same style.
I didn't realise that McDonald's owned Andy Warhol. I always assumed Campbell's Soup did.
You can still have consumerism with a divergence of style. You just can't have large concentration of wealth in select businesses and high cost of entry.
This kind of style comes out when there is high compeition and an economy that can support experimentation.
> Communism: everything must be “modern”, bland, and sterile
Have you ever seen the Moscow Metro?
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/oct/31...
Communism? Have you ever been to a (former) communist/socialist country and seen the huge amount of art everywhere? I expect not. Great example https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haus_des_Lehrers
What we are seeing is Americanism which is reduction of everything into value extraction. And that means getting rid of art.
Haven't you heard? Capitalism is now communism.
Banksy is an intelligence project. Related is Jackson Pollock.
Eh, you're gonna piss off a lot of jerks with the bit about communism and while you're not directly right, you're absolutely correct to be barking up the tree of central planning.
Everything looks the same these days because everything has to comply with local implementations of state implementations of the same federal regulations because that's how we do things in the US.
Feds take all the money. Feds doll it back out to the state in the form of grants with strings (drinking age is probably the most famous). States implement said strings which really means tell the locals to do it for the most part. And the states and locals are happy to enforce whatever if it means that the feds pick up 50% of the tab of that new traffic light they need that's 49% more expensive because it's built to federal standards, or whatever. Maybe it's a school thing or a sewer upgrade or whatever.
So then you get this stupid paradigm where even stuff that isn't McDicks or some other national chain with a brand they want to be consistent still gets built to look the same because it's complying with the same guidelines about turn radiuses and stormwater planters and interior/exterior light levels, etc, etc, etc and at any given point in time there's only one or a few cheapest ways to do all that. Any deviation is purely surface level, a custom color on a tile or panel.
Is the communism in the room with us now?
Do you mean modernism? You most likely mean modernism. Yes, it sucks.
Banksy is part of "communism"? Consider me skeptical.
It’s ideologically related and, unfortunately with our McDonald’s level standards of art and culture it passes for something akin to artwork.
You’ll find Flower Thrower at your local IKEA or hung in the bathroom of Chipotle. They wouldn’t be caught dead hanging actual art from, say, Renoir though. The focus is to destroy originality, destroy individuality, destroy religion, and promote sterilization (not of people, though of course in some cases authoritarian ideologies like this do promote such insanity) and mass production.
It’s all the same communist ethos. Not everyone agrees, and you’re certainly free to disagree of course, it’s just my opinion.
Your rant seems confused from an art history point of view.
I think we should talk about the Bauhaus and where they were coming from. Industrial mass production allowed for cheaply mass produced ornaments during Historicism. To me it is easily understandable why the Bauhaus wanted to find a different approach to how to deal with industrialization and how to incorporate it into architecture, going away from mere imitation and copying. I think it’s extremely fascinating that those ideas took root in the Soviet Union (creating utilitarian living spaces on a mass scale) and the USA (office buildings).
Many contemporary artists, however, have very little or nothing to do with Bauhaus and its ideas at all. There is just no link connecting them … and while the Soviet Union did employ industrialized mass production to build living spaces without ornaments its art was more often than not Socialist Realism, which is a different beast altogether.
But I do recommend you read Asylum for the Homeless by Adorno because I think you might like it: “Actually one can no longer dwell any longer. The traditional dwellings, in which we grew up, have taken on the aspect of something unbearable: every mark of comfort therein is paid for with the betrayal of cognition; every trace of security, with the stuffy community of interest of the family. The newly functionalized ones, constructed as a tabula rasa, are cases made by technical experts for philistines, or factory sites which have strayed into the sphere of consumption, without any relation to the dweller: they slap the longing for an independent existence, which anyway no longer exists, in the face.”
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You're so wrong that you're right again. The US funded and promoted modern art as a counterpoint to communism. There was even a submission about it a few weeks ago on here. [0]
> Nothing out of the ordinary or quirky, no individuality, all chains, all the same style.
One could say the same about capitalism/consumerism. In fact, many creatives have done so over the years. Bland and bleak life in the suburbs is a common theme. "Broad lawns and narrow minds" as Hemingway might have called it. So is the forlornness of a nondescript white-collar cubicle job. Even recently, the Backrooms taps into this.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49428080
The key difference is that communism converges on certain artistic styles as part of the ideology whereas market economies freely experiment. That’s why in communist societies you saw the suppression of artists and any deviation from the norm.
Consumerism, in my view, is also bad, but it’s not bad in the way that it affects art but bad in the way that demand for cheap goods forces fragile supply chains. It’s sort of lumped in with the suburbs critique. This poor building pattern arose because of demand for efficiency and cheap goods at all costs results in bland construction patterns. It just so happens that the blandness is a hallmark of communist styles of art and ideology.
The artist critiques you’re mentioning are criticizing the right thing (suburbia) for the wrong reason (capitalism and markets). In my view.
Capitalism of course has worthy critiques, but I think at least some if not much of the negative effects we see today are the result of massive nation states which are un-democratic.