151 Comments
Apr 27, 2022Liked by NE - nakedemperor.substack.com

I've complained about this art forever. It's a bit of a throwback to the Soviet agitprop but not entirely. It's the kind of art that depersonalizes you while giving you an illusion of an identity. In other words, it's the rat of arts!

Expand full comment
Apr 27, 2022Liked by NE - nakedemperor.substack.com

The psychiatrist Ian McGilchrist noted that, if you look at the history of art going back a few thousand years, you can see a sort of oscillation between flat, disproportionate art lacking in detail (think Medieval art), and realistic, detailed art (think Classical sculpture or Renaissance art). He further noted that this seemed to correlate to very distinct traits of the dominant society. His hypothesis is that it comes down to whether a given society is encouraging dominance of the left or the right hemisphere of the brain: the left not having any sense of the whole, and therefore missing entirely things like perspective or proportionality; the right by contrast having an immediate grasp of the whole and the relationship of the parts to that whole.

McGilchrist's theory can explain a remarkable amount about our current social pathologies, many of which are precisely what one would expect if the left hemisphere has run riot over the right. I've written up a quick introduction to his ideas here:

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/left-and-right-brains-and-politics

Expand full comment
Apr 27, 2022·edited Apr 27, 2022Liked by NE - nakedemperor.substack.com

My hubs is an illustrator. Decades ago he illustrated a book for a well-known political speechwriter. Topic was related to the successful expansion of technology into all industries - with one caveat -ART. While a computer can be a tool of artists, it cannot "create" art. As a result the writer proposed that artists would be increasingly valuable in generations to come.

Alegria Art looks like a typical computer program attempt at art. It's proliferation is reminiscent of recent unsuccessful movies that relied to heavily on special effects (programming) and not enough on the storyline (art).

Expand full comment
Apr 27, 2022Liked by NE - nakedemperor.substack.com

Grotesque. Turn two generations into spermless infantilized fearful pansies and you have the accelerated destruction of western civilization. The Cambridge Analytica thing really encapsulates the elites. 2008 Obama's campaign and FB openly brag about getting him elected. 2012 it's even worse. 2016 Trump steals their magic and it's a horrific scandal.

Expand full comment
Apr 27, 2022Liked by NE - nakedemperor.substack.com

"Hideous" is a good word for it. But any society that accepted an architectural style called "Brutalist" has long been well-down the road to hell.

But the infantilization of the creative impulse has permeated everything. I do a lot of crochet and am always searching for naturalistic patterns, and most of what one finds is this dreadful, dreadful stuff in the "kawaii" style which is Japanese for "cuteness." Abominations like plump grinning carrots.

Everything possible to distance us from even recognizing what real things look like.

Expand full comment
Apr 27, 2022Liked by NE - nakedemperor.substack.com

This style of art is irksome, condescending, and creepy. The fact that I have not consciously registered it until now is probably by design. The mind-controllers truly are using everything in their bag of tricks to implement the mass psychosis. Thank you NE (and Spartacus) for raising our awareness levels!

Expand full comment
Apr 27, 2022Liked by NE - nakedemperor.substack.com

I’d say the mouthless NHS ad is actually deviously clever. It reinforces the dehumanising purpose of masks without either of the characters actually wearing one.

Expand full comment
Apr 27, 2022Liked by NE - nakedemperor.substack.com

Part of it feels like the intent is to be deviant disguised as quirkiness. It makes it look different and somewhat childish and playful, which allows it to introduce crass, more abrasive intentions (as in the final image you posted). And so in some sense it downplays a lot of the seriousness, and I think for many people they may notice a sense of belittlement that comes from trying to portray quirky, colorful images when trying to get a message across that should be otherwise taken seriously. I guess more people are speaking out because there are a lot of underlying intents that are veiled by using such imagery.

Expand full comment
Apr 27, 2022Liked by NE - nakedemperor.substack.com

I was wondering if this styleless style had an actual name. Sound a little like "Alexis" to you?

Expand full comment
Apr 27, 2022Liked by NE - nakedemperor.substack.com

Microcephalic humanoids is telling.

Expand full comment
Apr 27, 2022Liked by NE - nakedemperor.substack.com

I’m not up to date on such things but wife and I noticed ads on YouTube for Google-fi with idiotic animation and even stupider songs and immediately hated it, but had to ask ourselves why. It’s because it’s infantilizing, condescending, and degrading. What kind of morons find this effective?

Expand full comment
Apr 27, 2022Liked by NE - nakedemperor.substack.com

See the 2005 (or 2006) movie “Idiocracy”. It’s not just this ugly “art”; it is dumbed down language too. There is a bank in my town called Washington Federal, which is proudly displayed on signs as “WaFD”.

WTF???

Expand full comment
Apr 27, 2022·edited Apr 27, 2022Liked by NE - nakedemperor.substack.com

Fun article. Seems weird that the origin story leaves out Adventure Time, which predated Buck / Facebook by years. Adventure Time took the the horrible, dour, geometric NickTunes style and subverted in all sorts of ways, getting back to original animation experimentalism. But it was brilliant thanks to being brilliant (literally, in the color pallet). But it also added the saturation of material objects into every medium and wide shot (*edit: I should say, in the more geometric, Symbolism-esque way that is replicated in Alegria, unlike in the 90s when heavy ink lines were still dominate). Buck discarded with this element, but it made its way back into the broader use, either as an unconscious Adventure Time influence or a repurposing of the out-of-fashion CGI Hieronymus Bosch trend of the late 00s (I miss Windows 7 wallpapers, they were actually really great).

Is Alegria good or bad? For me it depends on the use. Because of the reincorporation of the cluttered Adventure Time / Hieronymus Bosch motif, it has transcended the depressing, "human in a vacuum" version used by Facebook, though that version is still employed. And so when it depicts physical activity, I think it is subversive of the cancel culture / Great Reset agendas (even if not meant to be), and when it depicts inertia or sloth, I think it advances the cancel culture / Great Reset agendas. In the former case it emphasis the living, the fit, the not-online. In the latter case it emphasis the not-able-to-living, the disfigured, the online. And unlike with photographic "forced diversity" marketing, this has much less of a "here's what you are supposed to think" propaganda feel to me. But most of Zuby's curation is in the bad use category.

The style is a weapon, and like any other can be used for multiple ends.

Expand full comment
Apr 27, 2022Liked by NE - nakedemperor.substack.com

i see good signs of common sense and sanity in many of the younger young people i speak with these days, the younger the moreso. but i'm afraid we have a lost generation of upper middle class, college-educated people in their 20s on our hands whose voluble presence is vastly out of proportion to their numbers.

i think this 'art' is purposely insulting to the kind of people who like it - infantile adults with pinhead brains due to woke ideology-induced intellectual encephilitis, who think they are much bigger (does that explain the pride so many of them take in being obese?) and more powerful than they are, or will ever be.

like young people of every previous generation they believe that they know everything there is to be known, but the university of hard knocks known as life has always taken care of that problem, over time.

but this generation is different, with so many of the cohort believing that the artificial world of the devices they grew up with is as real as their facebook 'friends' and the absurdities of the cultural marxism their brains have been marinated in. it is at once a pampered and neglected personality disordered generation whose parents were happy to be replaced by devices in their children's lives.

the 'art' portrays them exactly as they are - but happy, which this generation is not - the moreso the more socially and privileged they are. they are young, but too old to be living with their parents because they're 'above' the only work they might be fit for, given the ludicrously worthless academic credentials so many of them have 'earned'; and careers in fact-checking don't appear to be promising.

it's not their fault that they did not have the parental love and care they needed as children, and that they are therefore perpetual adolescents. they are tragic, and like the human dinosaur figures with the tiny pinheads in the 'artwork', many of them are doomed to unhappy and empty and chaotic lives - bitter, humorless, loveless, sexless, and broken.

we've all seen them in action. so fragile are their minds that anything that threatens their belief system is a mortal insult that enrages them, sending them into rants and tears and tantrums.

but like the useless and insulting masks they will continue to wear as a badge of honor, they are incapable of feeling a genuine insult to their personal integrity - because they have been deprived of it.

Expand full comment
Apr 27, 2022Liked by NE - nakedemperor.substack.com

I hate it. Thank you for providing me with reasons why I cringe whenever I see these illustrations. The English vaccination poster is very disturbing.

Expand full comment
Apr 28, 2022Liked by NE - nakedemperor.substack.com

I hate the infantalising and condescension. It was creeping into society in the 1990s but I felt the first "slap in the face" from it when I visited the Millenium Dome in 2000. The whole exhibit was infantalised and dumbed down.

The one that really gets to me is the instructional video that communicates with you as if you are 7 years old but you are forced to watch it as there is some information you require. Grrrrr.

Expand full comment