Veeky Forums cringe thread

I can see myself typing something out like that guy, but meaning that it sucks that you just see more of it as it has become popular because you see a lot more shitty examples of the style.

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I have a subtle Kurt Vonnegut tattoo, and I will never be included in pictures like these.

I think it's supposed to be a line of heroin

it's not the fact that "too many people like it"; it's that it becomes kitsch. (Look up "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" by Clement Greenberg if you haven't read it.) Once a style becomes commodified, its original impetus to exist becomes obscured while its aesthetics become caricatured. The movie poster example is bad art because its maker failed to understand that minimalism is more than just "simple shapes and designs," and completely ignores the conceptual reasons for creating such an aesthetic in the first place. (Of course, there is no consensus among artists for a singular objective for minimalist art, but if you want an example you can look into John Cage and his circle being influenced by Eastern philosophy. Their motive in the minimal was trying to strip away all of art's unnecessarily decorative aspects to focus purely on art as an object creating a relationship with the viewer. When the aesthetic is stripped down to its barest roots of line and color, the relationship of viewer to art was no longer mediated by representational thinking and instead could be appreciated as an object first (in a sort of naturalist, Zen-inspired disposition)).

Anyway, the posters fail as minimalist art because there is a contradiction in trying to focus on simple shapes yet still relying on concepts central to the movie. So for LOTR, the circle has no value as a circle but only as a reference to the fictional ring portrayed in the movie (ie it has been made into a symbolic commodity (cf Baudrillard)). Its properties as a circle are neglected and thus any possible aesthetic exploration is blocked off at the pass. So instead of the circle being chosen in the process of reducing an aesthetic vision to its most essential elements of line and color, it is instead created through the mentality of reference. At a fundamental level, then, the posters are NOT minimalist art. They think they are but miss all the essential ingredients for why the movement was good in the first place.

It's inevitable that any new artistic style become kitsch, but still unfortunate because it signals the end of the movement's ability to be fresh. Of course, the reddit style of minimalism came long after the heyday of minimal art in Russia in the 1910s and then America in the 50s and 60s, but nonetheless the explosion in minimalist art on the internet in the early 2000s is partly responsible for minimalism being THE main style right now. (Look at the gradual simplification of logos like Pepsi or Windows for proof of minimalism being the dominant aesthetic.) A style becoming mainstream actively obscures its moral reasons for existing, and in minimalism I find this especially lamentable given that I think it has a lot to offer the world nowadays.

Is the joke here the "what I expected" part? I'm no Vonnegut fan by any degree, but you seriously expected a novelization of Reservoir Dogs? What, are you a 14 year old reading their first full novel? Just because of "slaughterhouse" being in the title? Fucking lame.

these people must know that the asterisk is explicitly an asshole, as in an anus
why would you tattoo an anus on yourself??

well they were tattooing vonnegut on themselves.

Minimalism is synonymous with autism.

The only bad films David E V E R made are Dune and The Straight Story, plebe