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Notes -
I'm curious why you describe the idea of utopia depicted in the poster as "ugly." The poster itself is not aesthetically pleasing -- the color scheme is pretty awful -- but is the scene it depicts any uglier than, say, this one?
I also don't get your claim that "Liberals at the moment seem very bad at articulating what kind of a world they want to create" -- doesn’t the poster do just that? It apparently does clearly enough for you to opine that said world is "ugly."
Yeah, I'd call it uglier. The scene in the painting looks mundane, not pretty but simply normal because it depicts a real situation in a real place, realistically. The scene in the poster is an illustration of an imaginary ideological utopia, so ugly that it needs to be stylicized in order to avoid reactions of disgust.
Again, I am not sure what it is that is depicted there that is disgust-inducing. Disgust is an awfully strong emotion, after all. And, the OP used the term "ugly" -- I took that as an aesthetic comment, rather than as a synonym for disgust, but perhaps that is indeed what they meant. I can certainly understand if someone found certain elements of the scene objectionable, such as the Antifa reference. Or even the LGBT-adjacent couple. But the overall scene of people going about their day -- walking the dog, flying a kite, going to work, hanging out with friends, etc, is a pretty regular street scene.
Again, I took the OP to be saying something other than "I disagree with the Greens' political vision," but perhaps that is indeed all they were saying.
If you want to look at the picture purely as an abstract piece of visual art, divorced from its context and implications, then fine, it can get away as being merely not pretty. But visualizing the scene and its constituent elements with some degree of fidelity should present an image that requires some ideological or at least aesthetic buy-in for the viewer not to be repulsed. See some of its elements:
Cripples
Fat people
Squatters
Graffiti
Transsexuals
Piercings
Tattoos
Antifa
Stoners
BLM
And I don't mean this as a jab against these categories, but I do mean to observe that someone who is not already inured to their sight would almost certainly feel some level of disgust were he to encounter their average representatives. Certainly those who are already on board will imagine more presentable examples instead, or idealized versions, and the poster is almost certainly simply an in-group signal aimed at them in the first place.
To rephrase: All of the elements enumerated above are, if not categorically then at least with most of their real-world examples, fit to cause disgust, and ugliness is merely description of the visual qualities that lead to the more visceral reaction in the viewer.
To be even clearer: Crippled limbs are ugly. Rolls of fat are ugly. Squats are, most of the time, ugly. Graffiti is ugly. Transsexuals are ugly. Piercings are, if not ugly in themselves, viscerally disgusting. Tattooed people are ugly. Antifa tends to be fairly ugly. Stoners often become ugly. BLM activities tend to be ugly. Yeah, there are probably counterexamples, but I'd wager they're rarer than those examples that prove my point. And yes, ugliness is subjective, so I posit some neutral human observer who sees any of these things for the very first time and has never heard of them before.
Really? People will feel disgust at encountering a disabled person? Not empathy?
You of course, are not the OP, but it seems to me that the Green position on these matters is that disabled people, nor any of those other types of people, are not inherently ugly. So, if that is the basis of the claim that the scene depicted is ugly, then that answers my question: That calling the scene "ugly" is just another way of saying "I disagree with the political positions espoused." Which is fine; like I said, I thought the OP was making a different type of claim.
Depends on the nature of the disability. Deformation, dismemberment, atrophy, oozing wounds and visible retardation will all cause disgust in most people. Hell, the myriad little debilitations and degradations of age will disgust young people who aren't used to seeing them. Empathy comes later, if at all, depending on the person. All this assumes no conditioning either way.
My point is that they needed to make it a stylicized cartoon in order to not repulse viewers. Whether that's any more than tangential to what OP intended, I don't know.
I'll disagree, the aggressive stylized blandness is the most offensive thing about this picture.
Do you think it would be more aesthetic or less offensive if they had actually picked the first available wheelchair jockey, fattie, squatter-occupied building, graffitied wall, transsexual, antifa mob and a stoner off the street and composed a photographic picture with those?
If they were halfway decent at photography, yes, I'd prefer to see that. But your condition is unreasonable. They didn't draw the first available thing, they drew specific things. It would be fair to let them pick specific people and locations.
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