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ZorbaTHut  3yr ago (text post)   37255 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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The art style is ugly, and I've noticed it online a lot recently, this particular sort of graphic design for progressive-type issues. Part of it is how they draw body hair - they can't do facial hair, they do these tiny black lines which don't look real. One I saw recently tried to show 'real women come in all shapes and sizes, smash patriarchy beauty standards' messaging by having a woman with visible arm hair - and if you know a woman with hairy arms, or are a woman with hairy arms yourself, you know this is not how arm hair looks. The style is just ugly, and they are so eager to show "smash the gender binary, smash patriarchy beauty standards, challenge the normies" that they do these fat, tattooed, ugly people (and I'm fat and ugly myself, before anyone leaps in with "who are you to talk?")

They don't have to do supermodel thin waifs, but jeepers, can they at least draw plump women and men who look like humans, and not with tattoos, piercings, undercuts, and Visibly Queer And Differently Abled all over them? 'yes, we can't just have a guy carrying his young child with him as he goes shopping, Dad must be drawn to look gender fluid, maybe even trans, and preferably a different colour to the kid'.

EDIT: I did like the gardener woman on the delivery bike, so that was one thing in its favour. A normal person going about their job. I won't comment on the tattooed woman in a very old-fashioned wheelchair in the middle of the road trying to walk her dog on a lead with one hand while she wheels herself with the other, because think about it for one minute: imagine wheeling a wheelchair one-sided, and how that would wobble all over the place, and then imagine that in the middle of a road with bikes, pedestrians, and what-not. Yeah, that works just fine and no accidents at all will ever happen!

As I mentioned, I am not a particular fan of that style either, but I don't think it particularly unique to progressives; I see it fairly often, and it seems to me to reflect contemporary Asian influences. As for the hair, it isn't supposed to look perfectly "real," any more than the hair on people in many illustrations in the 1920s looked perfectly real. Finally, I am not sure what you are referring to re facial hair - the father's beard is not tiny black lines. Do you mean the stubble on the person on the right? How else does an artist depict stubble in a minimalist way?

Finally, of course, this is a political poster. It is not meant to be a great work of art. It is meant to get people to vote for the party (and, indeed, the Greens gained 51 seats in that election )

Regardless of whether it is stubble or an incomplete pubescent beard, it clearly works: No one doubts that it is some sort of sparse facial hair. Honestly, the OP seems to be picking nits. I mean, I suppose one could criticize this as just a bunch of blobs of color, but that misses the point of what art is; ultimately, it is about fooling the eye, and indeed at a small enough scale, even a photorealistic painting is composed of tiny blobs of color, just as a digital image is made up of pixels.

Those are contradictory statements; a sufficiently-bad campaign poster would work against the campaign. It doesn't need to be the Sistine Chapel, but it has to have some artistic value to be of any value at all.

I don't know why so many people here work so hard to create strawmen. I said that it is irrelevant that it is not "a great work of art" not that it is irrelevant that if no artistic value at all.

the father's beard is not tiny black lines

Look at the facial hair on the man/woman who is hanging off the blind pink-haired with blue lipstick black woman.

Yes, I mentioned that: " Do you mean the stubble on the person on the right? How else does an artist depict stubble in a minimalist way?"

Are wheelchairs wobbly? I'd imagine that engineering would have eliminated virtually all the flimsiness out of even the folding kind.

It's the same principle as rowing a boat on one side only: if you don't switch the paddle stroke from side-to-side, you'll end up going in circles.

It can be done, but you need to practice, and in reality that woman would be constantly swapping the dog's lead from one hand to the other to do the zig-zag wheeling as here.

Note that the gardener woman is fat, dark-skinned, and the gardening company she works at is Turkish by name. There's a lot of signalling going on even there.

Yes, it is a political advertisement in a country in which people of Turkish descent make up a substantial (and probably electorally relevant) portion of the population. And, no surprise, the Green Party in Germany advocates for their rights, and indeed a Turkish-German was named leader of the party as far back as 2008. So, the "signaling" is simply a statement of the party's political position.

Well, yes. I do not disagree with any of these observations; I merely pointed it out.

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