Why Is Everything So Ugly? | The Editors
www.nplusonemag.com
Dodging huge grilles we walk on, pulled by ugliness toward a gentrified retail strip. Here the violence of the new ugliness comes more fully into focus. The ruling class seized cities and chose to turn them into . . . this?

But the contemporary built environment is not the millennials’ legacy; it is their inheritance. They didn’t ask for cardboard modernism — they simply capitulate to its infantilizing aesthetic paradigm because there is no alternative. Or if there is an alternative, it’s between an $8 ice cream cone or an $11 ice cream cone (or a $49 ticket to the Museum of Ice Cream).

time to discuss everyone's favorite subject: aesthetics! is everything actually ugly? are aesthetic critiques of modern living fascist? that's for you to decide!

  • 7bicycles [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Our dérive has deposited us near a subway stop. We swipe in with a trusty MetroCard, soon to be replaced by the privately owned data-tracking behemoth OMNY, whose neon-on-black logo recalls the chilly visual identity of another threat to transit, Uber.2 But at least as far as branding goes, OMNY is no uglier than other offenders.

    For some reason the link put me in the middle there, to that paragraph, and I immediately checked out the logo. Gotta say, looks pretty good to me? Seems to harken back to the 70s style of logos with that typefont.

    But then I never heard of OMNY before, but apparently it's garbage as far as the actual service goes, which seems to suggest to me it's not that everything is necessary ugly, it's just all shit and the world don't look nice through grey-coloured glasses.