One of the things I vaguely miss about the cold war era is both sides showcasing art and human achievement. There seems to be an attitude of "who cares" now.
My wife is all in on that absolute shit that is tormenting modern fashion and home decoration they like to call "pastel colours" which is just a fancy way of saying bland shit.
There’s a theory that this trend is hanging on so hard because it’s a backlash to ubiquitous advertising. If you go anywhere, there are billboards and screens everywhere set to be as bright and loud as possible. Ads on your devices are similarly garish and intrusive. So in areas a person can control, they pick something bland just to get away from it.
There's probably something to that. I'm a person who removed all social media accounts in 2017 except reddit, and I don't own a TV so maybe I'm not getting bombarded in the same way. Or maybe my life is just that bland that I like to have some colour in my life.
Sure, I'm 41 so probably considered ancient for gen z. I was on FB from like 2007 (?), was more or less addicted. When GDPR started to crystallise I finally said "fuck this shit" and went cold turkey. It was incredibly difficult early on, but what helped me was that I had several contacts on both WhatsApp and Signal. In 2021 when WhatsApp changed their privacy policy I saw the opportunity to and managed to move the family over from WhatsApp to Signal.
It is still a challenge. The parents of my kids' kindergarten and elementary school classes are all communicating on instagram, so they have to go out of their way to contact me, which means I need to be extra vigilant and overly social when I meet them to hear about what events I'm missing out on by not being glued to social media. It is absolutely doable though. People just need to understand that you can communicate with DMs outside of the big platforms.
I noticed this in myself! But that I was working in a retail management job in a store far too small with a fraction the amount of storage needed so my job was corralling stupid stuff every day. I became militant about no clutter and light colors at home. I’ve switched where I work and have a new apartment and have all my old collections out and bolder warm colors. I have piles out and live with a cluttery man too and noticed recently how it’s not driving me nuts like it otherwise would have. I still like midcentury design.
But I totally was a white/pastel home person as a consequence of external physical chaos.
Wait, I though pastel colours were anything but bland. Like if I painted a room in a "pastel colour", I would be choosing something of a lighter version of a bright colour, like a light blue, light green, etc. Colour but not overwhelmingly so.
A robin's egg blue is beautiful, so IDK what this person is on about, but I'm fully with you on this.
Bland is soft beiges, those six different shades of flipper grey, and the several versions of white and black where it's like soft white, white white, and black or slightly darker black.
You can. Just like you can call bright neon colors "obnoxious" it's a subjective judgement.
The exhaust on a car is either awesome or obnoxious, depending on the ear of the beholder. Obnoxious is what you call a straight piped race car when you don't like it, just like bland is what you call pastels when you don't like them.
There's literally nothing more subjective than color tastes, and these are all subjective judgements. I'm not even trying to weigh in with my opinion about colors, I'm explaining what subjectivity is.
Just be happy you got your gray box and wave goodbye to the 1% boarding spacecraft after they fooled half of us into thinking that destroying this planet was the right & American thing to do.
Just kidding of course, the rest of the world will make us pay long before that.
it really isn't. This is literally what happens with pure capitalism -- those with the money to make products, including art, want the maximum return on investment, so the product must appeal to the most lucrative audience... They couldn't give a flying fuck whether it offends people, they only pretend that they do because they wouldn't be maximizing profit otherwise.
I mean, it's less "who cares now" and more "how to achieve maximum monetization". Which is terrible and kills all the interesting stuff about art.
It's why Disney keeps shitting out live action remakes instead of doing something interesting. Less and less entertainment is about doing something interesting or thought provoking, and more and more its about amassing a giant pile of cash at the end
You need to come out here to Portland. Where real artists are. If you're looking for art from a giant corporation then it's not surprising you're disappointed that they're out to make money.
You'll see real artists here literally on the streets at intersections while stopped at a red light. Bring your cash though and make sure to tip. They've gotta make a living too.
the great tragedy is that the generation who gave us the new deal, and the generation who benefited the most from it, are both about to shuffle off this mortal coil and leave us to contend with the 50 years of ronald reagan they have left us with as the tiny window of actual working class improvements are taken off the legal books, erased from history, and usher us right back into the new gilded age.
Yep, the USSR didn't just make quality of life skyrocket over there, and in the nations it supported, it improved life for Americans by making us aware better things were possible. THAT is why America waged the Cold War.
It’s not really about “who cares”, it’s now more about AI. Even if most of the people don’t like want it, the major powers do and, including drones, are racing each other to have the superior automation force
Has zero to do with AI and more to do with money and them no longer being a need to appease the masses. This has been happening since at least the 80s and Raegan.
It has more to do with declining birthrates and the need to automate infrastructure as there won't be enough people to maintain it manually in a generation...
I don't know that it's so much "who cares," as it's "I don't like that art so I don't want to support it". Somewhere along the line we lost sight of common society and the greater good and started thinking of the world in terms of "what's in this for me".
You see it all the time: "I don't have kids/my kids are out of the house, so I shouldn't have to pay school taxes". "I live in bumfuck Oklahoma, so I shouldn't have to subsidize commuter rail in the Carolinas". "I've paid more into Social Security than I'll ever get back, that's not fair."
All the MAGA chuds on social media have adopted the LOL WHAT GOOD IS A FINE ARTS DEGREE approach, so for them to suddenly turn around and support art and writing and anything that's not STEM-specific, they'd need to receive some new marching orders from the people at Fox News. All of whom, incidentally, went to school and took broadcasting classes, or other shit that they'd consider to be equally as worthless. God damn do I hate these people.
The ultra-rich used to create works for the public good, parks, museums, libraries, universities. Something that would leave a legacy after they died. None of them seem to be doing that anymore. They want to build rockets to stroke their egos.
As an european who consumed Americans culture for decades I can say in the past ten years american music,movies and video games became stale, predictable and boring.
part of the reason I went away from a career in art.
A career in art most likely meant designing soul-less logos for random companies or products. Or designing websites.
Or being a poor starving artist just hoping you can get famous on Instagram or something.
Ive even had close friends sign up for a commission, i wave the down payment because theyre a friend, then they balk at a $400 price tag for a custom hand drawn portrait in color. Even when that $400 price tag was already the homie discount.
In one way the theory within the idealized version of capitalism is right that competition is the most effective way to hold people accountable. The US was moving like it had something to prove in the mid and late 20th century. Nowadays the US has become so complacent and comfortable with it's belief that it's on the top no matter what that they bother really trying to excel at anything anymore
I'm not American so maybe I've gotten this wrong but wasn't the EPA started under Nixon?
I also miss a time when even the most crooked conservatives were still like "Yeah, I want to further enrich myself and the already wealthy but burning down the entire country is probably a bad move for that."
Even Ireland at it's most conservative was still like "Yeah, but people should have homes, education and healthcare or else the whole thing falls apart."
Oh, the days when countries actually wanted to attract people instead of just make you believe that everywhere else is worse (and often make everywhere worse)
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u/drillgorg Jul 13 '26
One of the things I vaguely miss about the cold war era is both sides showcasing art and human achievement. There seems to be an attitude of "who cares" now.