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I love this. We need more whimsy. Unfortunately, refinement culture is taking over. Even the new McDonald's design is "private equity" refined.

ericmay 9d 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.
- morkalork 9d ago
  Is the communism in the room with us now?
- AnimalMuppet 9d ago
  Banksy is part of "communism"? Consider me skeptical.
  - ericmay 9d ago
    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.
    - deleted 9d ago
      [deleted]
    - arrrg 9d ago
      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.”
      - nephihaha 8d ago
        You criticise the previous poster for seeing Communism everywhere and then recommend them a book by Adorno, a dyed in the wool red. That will confuse 'em. https://iep.utm.edu/adorno/ https://iep.utm.edu/adorno/
        arrrg 8d ago
        Why? I wanted to point out the significant overlap in the views of Adorno and the ones expressed by the poster. Also, that essay is a real banger.
- cynicalsecurity 9d ago
  Do you mean modernism? You most likely mean modernism. Yes, it sucks.
  - ericmay 8d ago
    I strongly dislike modernism. I view it as related to, or perhaps even the artistic instrument of communist ideology.
- monksy 9d ago
  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.
- mnkyokyfrnd 9d ago
  Banksy is an intelligence project. Related is Jackson Pollock.
- wewxjfq 9d ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49428080
  - ericmay 8d ago
    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.
- sdcfgy 8d ago
  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 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.
  - apefulsin 8d ago
    Haven't you heard? Capitalism is now communism.
- helsinkiandrew 8d ago
  > Communism: everything must be “modern”, bland, and sterile Have you ever seen the Moscow Metro? https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/oct/31/moscows-metro-stations-in-pictures https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/oct/31...
- apefulsin 8d ago
  I didn't realise that McDonald's owned Andy Warhol. I always assumed Campbell's Soup did.
- cucumber3732842 8d ago
  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. Chili's gets a brass chili for the door pull. The weed dispensary across the street gets a blunt. But it's still the same goddamn vestibule entrance built to the same dimensions that the same calculation spits out.
  - Ar-Curunir 8d ago
    "Capitalist central planning is actually communism". If you're going to use wrong words, then be prepared for people to be pissed off at your wrong usage.
    - ericmay 8d ago
      What is capitalist central planning? That seems like an oxymoron to me.
      - Ar-Curunir 8d ago
        Have you heard of, e.g., Walmart? How do you think their logistics works? Or, similarly, any modern capitalist economy? Do you think it's entirely decentralized planning with independent actors?
mc32 9d ago
He's probably photographed it, but one of the biggest and the pinnacle of this idea, I think, is the Longaberger building in Ohio. If he did photograph it, I think it should have been among the ones listed in the article. Of course it's not as "folksy" as the others but it's in the same vein though greater in scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Longaberger_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Longaberger_Company
- Animats 9d ago
  The Longaberger Building, the giant picnic basket, is for sale, and currently abandoned.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F6n_xlckNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F6n_xlckNE
  - derwiki 7d ago
    I grew up nearby, the whole area is fairly economically depressed I have no idea if it’s true, but growing up there was always the urban legend that someone flew their small plane through the handles and had their pilot’s license revoked.
paulaq 8d ago
Yes, and this is also a unique aesthetic of a place. I see this and I know it's the US. Refinement culture makes every place of the world look the same.
- nephihaha 8d ago
  "I know it's the US" It could be Australia or Canada. They have similar.

ericmay 9d 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.

morkalork 9d ago
Is the communism in the room with us now?
AnimalMuppet 9d ago
Banksy is part of "communism"? Consider me skeptical.
- ericmay 9d ago
  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.
  - deleted 9d ago
    [deleted]
  - arrrg 9d ago
    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.”
    - nephihaha 8d ago
      You criticise the previous poster for seeing Communism everywhere and then recommend them a book by Adorno, a dyed in the wool red. That will confuse 'em. https://iep.utm.edu/adorno/ https://iep.utm.edu/adorno/
      - arrrg 8d ago
        Why? I wanted to point out the significant overlap in the views of Adorno and the ones expressed by the poster. Also, that essay is a real banger.
cynicalsecurity 9d ago
Do you mean modernism? You most likely mean modernism. Yes, it sucks.
- ericmay 8d ago
  I strongly dislike modernism. I view it as related to, or perhaps even the artistic instrument of communist ideology.
monksy 9d ago
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.
mnkyokyfrnd 9d ago
Banksy is an intelligence project. Related is Jackson Pollock.
wewxjfq 9d ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49428080
- ericmay 8d ago
  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.
sdcfgy 8d ago
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 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.
- apefulsin 8d ago
  Haven't you heard? Capitalism is now communism.
helsinkiandrew 8d ago
> Communism: everything must be “modern”, bland, and sterile Have you ever seen the Moscow Metro? https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/oct/31/moscows-metro-stations-in-pictures https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/oct/31...
apefulsin 8d ago
I didn't realise that McDonald's owned Andy Warhol. I always assumed Campbell's Soup did.
cucumber3732842 8d ago
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. Chili's gets a brass chili for the door pull. The weed dispensary across the street gets a blunt. But it's still the same goddamn vestibule entrance built to the same dimensions that the same calculation spits out.
- Ar-Curunir 8d ago
  "Capitalist central planning is actually communism". If you're going to use wrong words, then be prepared for people to be pissed off at your wrong usage.
  - ericmay 8d ago
    What is capitalist central planning? That seems like an oxymoron to me.
    - Ar-Curunir 8d ago
      Have you heard of, e.g., Walmart? How do you think their logistics works? Or, similarly, any modern capitalist economy? Do you think it's entirely decentralized planning with independent actors?

mc32 9d ago

He's probably photographed it, but one of the biggest and the pinnacle of this idea, I think, is the Longaberger building in Ohio. If he did photograph it, I think it should have been among the ones listed in the article. Of course it's not as "folksy" as the others but it's in the same vein though greater in scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Longaberger_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Longaberger_Company

Animats 9d ago
The Longaberger Building, the giant picnic basket, is for sale, and currently abandoned.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F6n_xlckNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F6n_xlckNE
- derwiki 7d ago
  I grew up nearby, the whole area is fairly economically depressed I have no idea if it’s true, but growing up there was always the urban legend that someone flew their small plane through the handles and had their pilot’s license revoked.

paulaq 8d ago

Yes, and this is also a unique aesthetic of a place. I see this and I know it's the US. Refinement culture makes every place of the world look the same.

nephihaha 8d ago
"I know it's the US" It could be Australia or Canada. They have similar.