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Why is everything so ugly?

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Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#301

Post by audunw »

throwaway220033 wrote: post #259

West is not just ugly, it’s also dirty, its streets smell pee, it has no moral compass, no standard in anything. It promotes abandoning traditions in favor of degeneration and the result is ugly and disgusting. Its politicians have orgies and organize festivals to run naked on the street once a year in the name of “pride”. Art is not art anymore, they’re producing “artists” who put candles in their ass and walk like…

A lot of that isn’t unique to the west.

China tore down most of its beautiful temples (the contrast between mainland and Taiwan is striking), totally obliterated any moral compass among its people, its politicians are just comically corrupt (when it’s politically convenient to prosecute one of them they need trucks to unload the literal ton of cash in their homes), etc. Their movies are now mostly pointless propaganda with zero appeal outside China.

And the examples you list are incredibly niche. There’s still plenty of good art if you care to look. There’s always been weird niche art and trashy popular art, all throughout the history of civilisation.

What country do you look to as a good example?

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#302

Post by secretsatan »

petepete wrote: post #54
jszymborski wrote: post #38

I just wanted to echo the gray frustration here. I went to buy vinyl flooring (I can't afford hardwood) and the sheer amount of inexplicably "grey wood" planks was staggering. Why! Like, it's as if some alien only saw wood in an episode of I Love Lucy and wanted to replicate it.

I thought this grey decor trend was a British phenomenon - glad it's not just us!

I remember all my rental properites in the uk had hideous beige woodchip wallpaper back in the nineties, and cheap carpets everywhere, surely it's an improvement on that.

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#303

Post by smileysteve »

NoPedantsThanks wrote: post #251
snakeyjake wrote: post #124

> After New York replaced the sodium-vapor lights in the city’s 250,000 streetlamps with shiny new LEDs in 2017, the experience of walking through the city at night transformed, almost . . . overnight. Forgiving, romantic, shadowy orange gave way to cold, all-seeing bluish white. Before the late 1970s, NYC was illuminated at night by pinkish-white incandescent bulbs. When the yellow monstrosities were rolled out peop…

The problem with LEDs is the massive increase in light pollution they cause.

But do they? LEDs are directional vs Sodium is omnidirectional and reflected; So given a similar housing, LEDs causes less light pollution.

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#304

Post by ryandrake »

NoPedantsThanks wrote: post #253
jszymborski wrote: post #38

I just wanted to echo the gray frustration here. I went to buy vinyl flooring (I can't afford hardwood) and the sheer amount of inexplicably "grey wood" planks was staggering. Why! Like, it's as if some alien only saw wood in an episode of I Love Lucy and wanted to replicate it.

When my parents were selling their house, their realtor told them they needed to paint a bunch of stuff grey because "that's what Millennials want." Now we mock everything grey as "Millennial grey."

Same when we sold our house. We had some pretty muted pastel colors in our rooms, nothing flamboyant like bright pink or whatever, and the first thing our realtor said was "we need to repaint everything light gray." We also offered to leave some of our furniture around in order to make the home appealing and show better. Again, nothing wacky, just a few sofas, tables and generic non-family pictures on the walls. Realtor said "nope, you need to stage it for 30-40 year olds" (with the most generic, bland, airbnb-like non-furniture I've ever seen). I can't argue with the results--she successfully sold the house in the recent toughest house market we've seen in 10 years. But, wow, that's the aesthetic now??

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#305

Post by vacuity »

runsonrum wrote: post #260
c0pium wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The evidence that blue light is bad for sleep is much worse from an experimental standpoint than the evidence that it improves cognition and reaction time, which are obviously rather important considerations in street lights. Consider for instance that placebo glasses which filter the so-called harmful blue light wavelengths have been shown to fully reverse the apparent effect on sleep quality. This is despite them j…

I have seen something similar on TV to do with MSG. The room was split down the middle and I believe the participants were told half the room ate food with MSG and the other half without. They interviewed the participants after and the majority on the side with MSG had symptoms. The only problem was that no one had consumed MSG. going off of memory from something I saw a decade ago

This kind of thing is why, while I hold the sciences in healthy regard, I'm especially wary of treating fields such as psychology as usually producing factual results.

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#306

Post by JohnFen »

snakeyjake wrote: post #124

> After New York replaced the sodium-vapor lights in the city’s 250,000 streetlamps with shiny new LEDs in 2017, the experience of walking through the city at night transformed, almost . . . overnight. Forgiving, romantic, shadowy orange gave way to cold, all-seeing bluish white. Before the late 1970s, NYC was illuminated at night by pinkish-white incandescent bulbs. When the yellow monstrosities were rolled out peop…

It's amazing how people get used to stuff. I remember well how awful those sodium lamps were when they were first put in, and how nearly everyone hated them in part because they made everything look ugly.

Now, people get nostalgic for them. People are weird.

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#307

Post by NoPedantsThanks »

ryandrake wrote: post #304
NoPedantsThanks wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When my parents were selling their house, their realtor told them they needed to paint a bunch of stuff grey because "that's what Millennials want." Now we mock everything grey as "Millennial grey."

Same when we sold our house. We had some pretty muted pastel colors in our rooms, nothing flamboyant like bright pink or whatever, and the first thing our realtor said was "we need to repaint everything light gray." We also offered to leave some of our furniture around in order to make the home appealing and show better. Again, nothing wacky, just a few sofas, tables and generic non-family pictures on the walls. Real…

Well now all of a sudden "clutter" is supposed to be in.

This is symptomatic of declining taste across the board... which actually means the trend of celebrating shitty taste, which has always existed in plentitude.

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#308

Post by donatj »

Fluorescence wrote: post #276
donatj wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minneapolis Suburbs. There’s been a huge apartment building boom, and cities with leftover small town vibes have passed these ordinances.

Can you drop a street-view link? I sometimes quite like what others claim is hideous in these discussions, mainly because it's a refreshing change from my own local architectural group-think. There is a fair bit of regionality in the "cardboard" being pumped out. I expect future generations will create taxonomies and venerate it and laugh at all the naysayers here as has happened so often before! We are too close to…

Most of them in my town are newer than the street view data, here's a couple older ones however

- https://maps.app.goo.gl/cec7VtUmDsAeHm5w7

- https://maps.app.goo.gl/h3p8xeBWgrAM7TjF8 (see directly behind this view as well)

- https://maps.app.goo.gl/GHcmRYGQS6fmMX1p9

A previous poster has a good example of the style as lll

Re: Why is everything so ugly?

#309

Post by ricardobeat »

rootusrootus wrote: post #249
ricardobeat wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Contrast with highways where you do want people to stay awake, so blue makes sense I remember some kind of study around yellow light being ideal for roads actually. The human eye is more sensitive in the green/yellow part of the spectrum, the lights are more efficient and cut through fog better.

The difference between white & yellow light in fog is minimal. What really makes fog lights effective is being under 18 inches off the ground so they shine under the fog.

White light scatters more since it contains multiple wavelengths, generating more glare and losing brightness faster. And this is about street lighting, a 10% difference in brightness can result in massive energy savings.
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