Hot take: The much quieter level of corporate Pride this year is not worth celebrating.
Not because I want to spend my dollars on Pride merch sold by corporations that don’t care, but because the near-absence of corpo Pride is a canary in the coal mine. Corpo Pride is a barometer of sorts for social acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community. If Corpo Pride goes away, it should be because being LGBTQ+ is so normalized and seen as “no big deal” that there’s no message to ‘sell’ anymore; but what’s happening now is NOT that.
What IS happening then? Because I’m confused
What is happening is not that corporations are winding down the Pride displays and merch due to Pride being no big deal anymore because we live in a society where LGBTQ+ people are just seen as the same as everybody else.
What is happening is corporations are staying away from Pride because public shows of acceptance of LGBTQ+ people now comes at a much higher cost. For corporations, that cost is monetary. For people, that cost is physical violence - and I’m not saying it’s new that people have been violent towards the LGBTQ+ community. I’m saying the violence is now much more widespread, and isn’t just aimed at the community anymore, but at anybody who either supports the community or LOOKS LIKE they might belong to the community. Corporations deciding not to display rainbow logos and merch is just a sign of how bad things have actually gotten in the last few years.
TL;DR : Corporations “supported” us when it was easy. That many no longer visibly do so means it’s no longer easy to do it. That’s not a good thing.
okay, I don’t even fucking like modern art that much, but you’re just plain wrong here. you don’t know how much you don’t know.
trying to capture a painting through photography is kind of a fools’ errand. especially a huge painting like Who’s Afraid Of Red, Yellow, and Blue. The things that make a painting like this impressive just do not photograph well. Furthermore, the things that made this particular painting impressive are impossible to see without seeing it in real life. (which, tragically, is no longer possible. fuck art vandals.)
let me give you an example with a more accessible painting. Let’s look at Van Gogh’s Wheat Field With Crows, one of his final paintings. It’s widely considered to be a masterpiece.
Here’s Wikipedia’s png/svg image of it:
looks kinda flat, right? kinda meh? not particularly impressive? but look at this close-up image:
you see how the brushstrokes build on each other? how every stroke gives the painting more texture, almost like a wafer-thin sculpture?
now imagine the entire thing with a subtle glow, a shimmer that moves as you walk past the painting, capturing the light of a wheat field with scattering crows right before a storm. because of the way paint works, most paintings have a subtle shimmer to them. oil paintings have more of a shimmer, because they’re varnished. acrylics, like Who’s Afraid, have less, but it’s still there. and that shimmer is impossible to photograph without making the image itself illegible. it just looks like glare.
and this is true of every painting. any photo you see of a painting is the flattest, deadest possible version of that painting. you can’t see the way the artist pushed the paint to give it texture. you can’t see the shimmer. you can’t see the light reflected on the ground beneath. you can’t move around and get a look at the different angles, or feel dwarfed by the immensity of a canvas that’s two feet taller than you that just screams RED.
from what little I understand, the Who’s Afraid paintings are mostly an exercise in technique. the entire point was getting the paint to have as smooth of a texture as possible.
which, uh, have you worked with acrylics? i have. let me tell you, acrylic paint wants to look like chicken scratch. getting it to look smooth is real fuckin’ hard. painting over it? fucks with the texture. varnishing it? fucks with the texture bad, and makes it look oily and glowy in a way it wasn’t supposed to. it takes that subtle sheen and makes it look slick.
what happened to this painting is the equivalent of someone putting 80s blue eyeshadow and bright red lipstick on the Mona Lisa. you can’t get it off. you can’t reverse it. the painting is destroyed, whether you like it or not.
the level of proud ignorance and anti-intellectualism you are showing here is, uh. it’s on par with a made up guy saying “why are there so many different programming languages? can’t you just write everything in assembly? that seems like it’d be easier.” it’s honestly kinda sickening.
like I said- I don’t even like most modern art, it really doesn’t do it for me. but you don’t have to be an art snob to know why this is a bad thing, or to care about it.
here’s a great video that elaborates further on the history of this particular painting and also why hatred for modern art and fascism are intimately entangled
(OP has since clarified they were more making fun of Wikipedia displaying the painting as a vector, which flattens color, and that their original post was badly worded, and even if they didn’t I’m not saying anyone who makes ‘modern art is dumb’ jokes is a fascist. but it’s necessary to point out where this irratiinal hatred comes from.)
As a student of art, let me tell you that not liking a particular artist or period of art is okay, but insulting it just because it isn’t your thing is not okay. Human expression is the heart of our existence.
I once had to unfriend someone I cared about because every time I posted something from Rothko, she would make snide comments, even after I dm’d her and asked her not to.
Her objection was that his stuff is “just boxes” and anyone can do that. But no, they can’t. The depth and complexity of how he painted immerses you in a field of color. Furthermore, each paining of his is an experiment in how that color makes you feel. For instance, this one i find calming:
While this one fills me with dread:
These paintings are big enough that if you stand two feet away, they fill your field of vision. The photographs don’t do them justice, but you get the point.
I’ve never seen the “Who’s afraid” paintings, but I second everything that @earlgraytay wrote.
I’ve said before of modern art that it’s not my thing but it’s someone’s thing and therefore should exist, but there’s something else I want to bring up in relation to the idea that art looks different on a computer screen:
I do not remember why I love La Vie.
That probably sounds hella cryptic or weird, but. When I was eleven, my mom took me to the Cleveland Art Museum, and I saw La Vie in person. I literally stopped dead in the middle of walking and gasped. Eventually she had to prod me to keep moving. I, a kid with badly-medicated ADHD who’d just skipped right by one of Monet’s Water Lilies pieces like it wasn’t there, stopped and stared at this painting for a good five or ten minutes.
Here it is. Or rather, here it isn’t.
I don’t remember what looked so different about it in person. That was over 20 years ago. But I remember that this? This would never have made me stop dead so quickly someone ran into me from behind. This–sorry, Picasso–is almost boring. This is not La Vie. Not the way it really looks. Someday I want to go back to the Cleveland Art Museum just to see it again (and maybe to actually pay attention to Water Lilies this time). Just to remember what it’s actually like.
Now I have seen modern art in person and not liked it. But @earlgraytay is so extremely right that really, truly, many of these pieces you do indeed have to see in person to genuinely say whether you like them or not. I’m not saying you can’t get an impression from digital images or prints. Certainly you can. I’m absolutely enchanted by The Persistence of Memory and often call it my favorite painting, and I’ve never seen it in person. (I want to. Someday, someday.) But do I actually know what it looks like? I mean, kind of, but not really.
Before you say a piece of modern art is downright stupid, see if you can find a local gallery and check out some of their art. Even if you come away still saying “this isn’t for me,” it may give you an idea of why people paint this stuff in the first place, and enrichment is good for the soul.
One of the big obvious reasons why this happens is that original non-digital art is often much bigger than what you can get on a computer screen (or a photo in an art history textbook), but there’s another very important reason:
This is a diagram of the gamut of a standard “sRGB” computer monitor. Using a mixture of the deep blue, deep red, and pale green at the corners of the triangle, a monitor can fake any color inside the triangle. (The light-to-dark axis of color space is at right angles to this diagram.)
The much bigger gray sorta fingernail shape surrounding the triangle? That’s the space of all the colors your eyes can see (at this slice through the light-to-dark axis, which is the slice with maximum color saturation; as you get closer to white or black the fingernail shrinks).
The greenest green you can get on your monitor is a cheap, shabby imitation of a truly saturated green; to a lesser extent the same is true of red and blue. You don’t notice because your brain adapts – but take a picture of something really, truly green on a phone camera and then hold the picture up next to the original and you can make yourself notice.
(Some newer monitors can display a broader color gamut, but whether this actually works for a particular image depends on every piece of software and hardware that touched the image from its creation until its display, so you can’t count on it unless you’ve gone to a whole lot of extra trouble.)
(Film photographs have the same problem, although not as bad, and it depends on which film you’re using. I know of a professional photographer, goes by “Ctein”, who cares so much about quality color reproduction that when Kodak announced they were discontinuing what he considered to be the best color film on the market, he purchased himself a lifetime supply of that film and the developing chemicals for it.)
Artists’ pigments, on the other hand? Most definitely can hit the most intense colors possible, maybe with a few exceptions (“structural coloration” of bird feathers is notoriously difficult to capture with pigment).
Point being, when you’re looking at a photo of a painting, you are not seeing the same colors you would see if you looked directly at the painting.
Monica is the head negotiator for the Writer’s Guild, a collective of Hollywood screenwriters who are edging closer and closer to a full on strike if the studios refuse to meet their incredibly reasonable demands. All the writers are asking for is fair treatment and compensation for their labor, but after a meeting with the greedy T-Rex CEO of Cobbler Studios goes south, a strike is called.
Now Monica and her companions are marching the picket lines and making their voices heard, working together to create better working across the film industry.
Unfortunately, this puts a terrible distance between Monica and her girlfriend Holly, who happens to be the physical manifestation of her own screenwriting. With no way to process these feelings, Monica looks for solace in the writing community itself, but will these efforts be enough to battle the cruel, money-hungry CEOs?
This important no sex tale is 4,100 words of collective bargaining as laborers organize to protest a nauseating dinosaur CEO with the power of solidarity and love.
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AUTHORS NOTE: greeting buckaroos. this tingler is given to all FOR FREE in solidarity with writers guild buds who are currently making their voices heard and striking with incredibly reasonable demands.
the wga is asking that any donations go to the ENTERTAINMENT COMMUNITY FUND which is used to directly help those in the entertainment industry in need and who will feel the financial burden of not working during a strike.
as i said this tingler is free HOWEVER if you have the means you can donate the amount a tingler usually costs (three dollars or MORE if you would like) to the charity fund and support. just click the link and when it says ‘gift designation’ select 'film and television’
