Should Ron DeSantis win the Republican presidential nomination over Donald Trump? Is he more electable, would he do a better job? I don't know, but I do suspect that the frantic opposition to DeSantis in the press is scraping the bottom of the barrel pretty hard in dreaming up attacks: he's a fascist, he's an authoritarian, he suppresses voters, etc. In a sign of unusual desperation, Jeff VanderMeer has latched onto a startling accusation: DeSantis's minions are so mean to the press that they "coarsen" the discourse and make
almost every issue in Florida a slow grind to move through, but also as gray and lifeless as a Brutalist trompe-l’oeil.
As HotAir's David Strom
notes, that's a pretty obscure complaint. Myself, I'm aware of Brutalism, and of tromp-l'oeil, but the intersection between the two is a new one on me.
Wiki summarizes brutalist architecture as "characterised by minimalist constructions that showcase the bare building materials and structural elements over decorative design. The style commonly makes use of exposed, unpainted concrete or brick, angular geometric shapes and a predominantly monochrome colour palette...." Fair enough. Brutalist paintings tend to jar the eye with visual and thematic ugliness. In contrast, the style called tromp-l'oeil, or "fool-the-eye," normally connotes decorative surfaces that create an illusion of space or three-D objects. The effect can be surreal or disturbing, but more often is wish-fulfilling and pretty.
While I can do without Brutalism, a serious buzzkill, tromp-l'oeil is the essence of fun, to the point of flippancy. Nor is it easy to grasp what DeSantis's meanypants PR pro Christine Pushaw is doing to make public discourse gray and lifeless. If anything, she should be accused of sacrificing sober fairness in service of vivid and effective humor. She punctures humorless windbags like VanderMeer with memorable efficiency.
Here's some nice tromp-l'oeil.
Here's some brutalism:
This is the closest I've found to something that might be called tromp-l'oeil brutalism:
It could be called too cute by half, or reviled for inducing queasiness, but I'd never say it was gray and lifeless.
7 comments:
On the other hand, it's nice to see people implicitly admitting that brutalism is awful.
All those buildings need is a rainbow mural and maybe a smiley face. Maybe tromp-l'oeil really is the answer.
If you could make them look like anything other than what they actually are, it'd be an improvement.
The fibbie building in DC is a good example of the genre. A building that looks like they turned Lubyanka prison inside out. Except the rats are still in the inside.
Brutalism, Bidenism, Obamaism, socialism, communism, are all of the same root.
Denial of the true, the good, and the beautiful.
Greg
Brutalism can be intriguing in the engineering sense, but even painted pastel with murals on the side, as in the former Warsaw Pact lands, it does not move the soul or warm the spirit.
It does make a good analogy for parts of the bureaucratic world, however.
LittleRed1
Greg nails it I think. I'll give to brutalism that it's at least honest. It's not trying to fool you one bit. Compare that to a lot of contemporary architecture that is all too clever facades pretending to be revolutionary and interesting, but wrapped around a very conventional structure. The (W)rapper building by Eric Owen Moss in Culver City is a good example of that phenomenon.
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