Panini

How in the world do you manage to open up the food container and fill their bowls silently enough for them to not come sprinting from across the house the moment they hear it?

Very insightful response, thank you.

The reason I went to gang culture is I literally witnessed that from afar almost every day where I grew up. I’m aware some of the symbology of it it can be used outside of that since it’s not really from gang culture(and tried to make note of that), I jumped to the gang culture association from that with help from the gold teeth and general vibe of the piece. It wasn’t “oh it’s latino/black culture? you mean gangs?” so much as “oh that looks like the graffiti by the bridge where I grew up” and “oh yeah, that drug dealer who lived 3 blocks over when I was 12 is the only person I’ve ever seen with visible gold teeth” (actually true lol). I’m aware that since I’m white and have some degree of racism packed into me from childhood by the way I was raised, and it may have had an influence here, but I’m pretty sure a part of this case just came from direct lived experience where I grew up adjacent to, but not part of, black and latino (mostly black tho) communities where a gang subculture was present.

My disgust came from the arrogance and hostility I perceived around that subculture. It was annoying and pathetic to see it idolized where kids around me grew up pretending it was cool to threaten to kill someone for coming to “their street” or whatever. There’s probably something to be said about a white person being disgusted by projected confidence perceived as arrogance from a marginalized group, but I don’t put any respect on gangs themselves so I don’t actually care about being derogatory in that narrow application. Beyond the gangs I wouldn’t put that association intentionally, but it seems I did here so I apologize and I’ll make note to check myself more often in that regard, and make note that there’s art styles out there like this one that can set off some false associations in my mind.

That said, I’m a little surprised you’re surprised this is a probably common interpretation of art styled like this. It intuitively feels like it’s gonna be the most common white person response, whether with a more explicitly racist tone or not.

So I take it that wasn’t what you were going for.

Seriously, this wasn’t critique. As far a I’m concerned it’s great art, it just isn’t sending the emotional message you were apparently hoping for, and I’m genuinely sorry to have been the bearer of bad news in that regard. But lots of amazing art intends to, or accidentally, invoke disgust and/or repulsion. There’s nothing wrong with that.

I didn’t offer a tip to improve because as far as I could fully assume you hadn’t done anything that needed improvement (I stress again, this isn’t a “fuck you” response, it’s good art, I just received a message from this art you clearly didn’t intend). But I’ll explain why I think this gave me the emotional message it did, and you can take what you want from that. Disclaimer that I’m very much not an art expert, just a random normie doing my best to walk through my instinctual reactions.

When I look at this mouth, the very first thing my brain gets to processing is the shape of the mouth and the emotion it’s conveying (since we’ve got very facially oriented brains), which to me reads as “arrogant smirk”, “heh, got you, bitch”, or something very similar. So right away my base feeling is “oh fuck this guy”. But right away I’m drawn to the gold, and the way it drips. It’s hard to pin down exactly why this feels so incredibly disgusting, but I think it’s a combination of things. I’m not familiar with hip hop culture and it’s influences, so this might be a big part of the miscommunication. My immediate association is to gang culture, particularly from Detroit/Chicago (as someone from a smaller city directly between those cities) where all kinds of gold accessories are used to convey wealth and status, occasionally including gold teeth or gold plated teeth, which I’ve never seen outside that subculture. So I’m continuing on from that initial feeling to something of a gang pride/arrogance association. And then the dripping happening everywhere, which given the emotional context I’ve already got up to this point, highlights both the presence of gold (literally dripping gold) and leans into conveying disrespect and looking down looking down on the viewer (I’m not sure how it does that, but most art I’ve encountered before with the dripping off the lip or in the mouth symbology seems to be portraying some kind of smug(?) elegance, and I mostly only see it in ads for luxury products and graffiti, which may explain that). Then, and only then, do I get to the “fuck ice” text. And even before I read the text I first notice the font: a font used very often in gang culture (remember my brain had already gotten to there earlier), but this time more Latino specific, and it makes me think of LA or something. In other contexts the font can read as rebellious or strong, but since the attitude I’m getting here is already arrogance, it’s getting the least charitable association. When we do hit the text, however, all of my feelings up to this point we sort of sent haywire, since I strongly agree with the message. Now I start to double back on my interpretation of the font, and then the entire rest of the piece, and get a sort of “ohhh, this was supposed to be reinforcing the political message?”. And finally only then do I realize the colors of the lips are the Mexican flag. But it’s already came across really poorly by this point, and my feeling is already disgust. So now I start to read into the authorial intent, and I’m conflicted. This was apparently a very direct “fuck ICE” message, but every single thing about this before the text has given me disdain for the message, which then makes me think “Oh, what if it’s not actually a genuine fuck ICE message? What if it’s a malignant parody by someone who does support ICE trying to paint opposition to ICE as arrogant Mexican gangsters?”. So then I run through that possibility, but I realized about here that most conservatives just aren’t that artistically brilliant, and since we’re on Lemmy I really should assume people here are mostly left wing, so the only interpretation I could assume is “this person accidentally created a brilliant piece of pro-ICE propaganda directly counter to their intended message” and frankly, I hate that assumption, so I left open the possibility that either the dissonance was actually intentional and you were trying to get me to critically analyze the way the attitude doesn’t actually override the core message, or that there was extra art interpretation stuff here happening I couldn’t understand. So I was left with “yeah it made me feel things lol, but those things are terrible” as my thoughts.

It makes me feel visceral disgust and repulsion and feels like a malignant, disingenuous parody of the message of the text, so if that’s the emotion you were going for it looks great. Certainly wouldn’t recommend it as political messaging though, lol.

(To be clear, I’m not trying to be mean, it did get me to feel something strongly which is always a success in art. I just have no idea if the thing it made me feel is what you were going for.)

Open source Android is a thing??? TIL that might be my solution to this long term since I sideload apps regularly.

Recent history has led me to be highly pessimistic about this being translated into positive life improvements for regular people ranger than simply further enriching and empowering billionaire lords and police and military megaaparati, but the people at BD seem to be genuinely interested in ensuring their inventions are firstly used for good, so that’s nice.

I’m having the same issue from a different insurance, thought it was a federation issue but I haven’t seen this specific issue on any other community from this instance.