[jaspax]

Funny, looking at those pictures greatly reduced my interest in the genre of body-painting, if that's what world champions look like. They certainly have technical expertise, but nonetheless to my eye they are both ugly and off-putting by the ubiquity of their political subtext. And it's not even politics that I necessarily disagree with! But political cartoons are not improved if you paint them on a human body.

[utotranslucence]

(author of the essay here) I agree bodypainting can be garish (one of the reasons I no longer do it!), but the reason all those pieces were political is that every year the championships have a theme and that competition on that day the theme was literally 'propaganda'--so that was the theme the artists had to work with. Other years the theme is very different--I competed in years where the themes were rebirth, evolution, sources of power, transformation etc--idk I can't remember exactly, but they were generally set months in advance.

[alfor]

A lot of cliché and propaganda.

We are in the end of a destruction phase, the left, progressive are about change and destruction of order and renewal but they now have monopoly over almost everything.

The next step is the rediscovery of order, tradition, beauty, natural laws, religion.

The artists are at the tip of the process, we will start to see more and more flip back.

Have you seen this: https://youtu.be/j800SVeiS5I

[jaspax]

Sorry, but that video is also bad. The whole point is that not everything needs to be a campaign ad.

(Additionally, the video is twice as long as it needs to be. By minute 4 I was bored and scrubbed ahead to see if he was going to do something other than beat the dead horse some more. The turn into the antithesis finally happens around minute 10, at least 5 minutes after it should have been over.)