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Billboards

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realitycheck44

Do You Like Billboards?  

41 members have voted

  1. 1. Do You Like Billboards?

    • Yes.
      20
    • No.
      6
    • Don't Care.
      10


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There are times in Atlas Shrugged where Miss Rand refers to billboards as a symbol of human progress. I remember one scene when Dagny and Hank are on their trip to find the inventor of the motor and she was looking off into the distance hoping to find a billboard. I was driving up through British Columbia to go skiing the other week when I ran across a beautiful town that was scattered with billboards. I found them horribly unattractive in what would have been a nice town. The town to me was the symbol of progress- the Walmart and the relatively nice cars- not the billboards.

That being said, I do think that in cities, if done properly, billboards are not too bad.

I just wanted to see what position you guys take. :)

Zak

Edited by realitycheck44
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I wondered about that line as well. I have never found them particularly attractive. However, if a company decides to put one up, I really don't care. It doesn't bother me. I don't have to look at them if I don't want to. So I voted for "don't care." As for me, my favorite symbol of progress is sitting in an expensive restaurant in Vail, Colorado, and being able to look at the snow and the trees without having to be cold or wet or dirty. :) That is the ultimate conquering of nature: to be able to call it pretty. ;) If I was in a third world country, I don't think it would be pretty at all. In that sense, I think a symbol of progress would be a billboard advertising camping equipment! :):lol:

edited to fix a typo

Edited by non-contradictor
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I hate billboards. They are invariably horrificly ugly.

When I'm aware of them I tend to think of that scene in "Brazil" when the car is driving on a road with an endless string of billboards on either side so that they cannot see the beautiful landscape around them.

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I like them, but I'm speaking from the standpoint of an urban environment. They add spice while fitting in naturally with the environment.

For example;

One

(taken looking out from Union Square in San Francisco, one of my favorite places on Earth)

Two

Three

(I don't think that Levi's store is there anymore. It didn't really fit in anyway- being amongst stores like Tiffany and Saks Fifth Avenue)

and I just had to throw this one in for beauty's sake:

Four

Wow, looking up San Francisco pictures really gets me off-trck.

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I wondered about that line as well. I have never found them particularly attractive. (...)

As for me, my favorite symbol of progress is sitting in an expensive restaurant in Vail, Colorado, and being able to look at the snow and the trees without having to be cold or wet or dirty. :D That is the ultimate conquering of nature: to be able to call it pretty. ;) If I was in a third world country, I don't think it would be pretty at all. In that sense, I think a symbol of progress would be a billboard advertising camping equipment! :D:)

edited to fix a typo

You have no idea how awesomely you just expressed an opinion I could not articulate but have held forever.

Zak

PS: Change Vail to Whistler and it's perfect. :D

Edited by realitycheck44
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I really dislike billboards. I find most to be in bad taste. Exceptions would be city billboards-- brightly lit and high tech, the kind of stuff you find in Times Square. However, I've spent much of my life in the country, and I defy somebody to find a redeeming characteristic in those dull, ugly highway billboards that have become so prolific.

I'm not against advertising. Hell, I worked at a commercial graphic design firm for three years. But billboards are just a crappy medium-- more often than not, they lack any modicum of grace, good design, or aesthetic value. Ugh :)

Edited by Durandal
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There are times in Atlas Shrugged where Miss Rand refers to billboards as a symbol of human progress. I remember one scene when Dagny and Hank are on their trip to find the inventor of the motor and she was looking off into the distance hoping to find a billboard. I was driving up through British Columbia to go skiing the other week when I ran across a beautiful town that was scattered with billboards. I found them horribly unattractive in what would have been a nice town. The town to me was the symbol of progress- the Walmart and the relatively nice cars- not the billboards.

That being said, I do think that in cities, if done properly, billboards are not too bad.

I just wanted to see what position you guys take.  :)

Zak

If everyone who disliked billboards acted ethically in complaining, and refusing

commerce with, all the parties involved because they thought they were

aesthetically devaluing the observer's environment, the market would eliminate all

the "ugly" billboards in four days.

If that's what the market wanted. And if the populace was rational. So what does

the continued existence of ugly billboards tell you?

Billboards, as requests for commerce, are certainly a sign of progress and

optimism, but if they are just a sign of a sheep-like populace, it's perfectly rational

to feel "used" and "soiled".

Thus the utility of aesthetics as a standard to promote action to increase

happiness.

-Iakeo

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Oh, of course, anything else would be a violation of property rights. I was speaking soley from the aethetic point of view. They are great in cities and exit signs I wasn't really considering as billboards.

I suppose billboards are like most things; if done right, they are good, but if done poorly, they are bad. I just happened to see many that were done bad.

But no, I don't generally do as Dagny and Galt did and look for billboards as a pillar of human progression. The fact that I can drive mountain passes while listening to my favorite music with the air conditioning on is what human progress is about. Not some billboard advertising some casino or whatnot.

Zak

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You drive through mountain passes with the air conditioning on?  Don't you get cold?

I imagine that most of you dislike TV commercials in addition to billboards (I do too); so the problem isn't with billboards in particular, it's just that the whole field of advertisement today is based on the principle that people are mindless automatons that can only learn through being repeatedly hit on the head.

Yeah, the last couple trips in the mountains have been pretty hot. :) As you probably know, Steven's didn't have a season really and the trip up to Big White (the most recent one; I refer to it in my first post in this thread) was pretty warm too. Before that, it was summer. I'd rather have the windows down, but my mom prefers the air conditioning. In the winter, I usually don't turn on either.

Yeah, TV comercials are exactly like billboards to me: great analogy :(. I enjoy a few commercials because they are witty or just classy. I always enjoy watching the "Best Commercials of ... . But other than that, commercials mostly insult your intelligence.

Zak

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  • 2 months later...

If any of you have been to a place like Orlando Florida, you get to see some of the BEST billboards around. It really is like an art down there. Billboards with beautiful designs, moving parts, lights, special effects etc. I like driving through the town looking out for the new billboards whenever I visit.

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I'm largely indifferent to billboards. To me, their value is informational. If I'm taking a road-trip and am beginning to feel a mite peckish, I like to know what options I have for remedying the situation, or how far I'll need to go to find such options. If I’m not looking for something in particular, I don’t really notice the billboards.

Regarding the original poster’s question about Dagny and Hank, I think billboards, in that case, would have been a sign of productive activity, of someone with a product to sell, which was otherwise absent.

"What I'd like to see," said Rearden, "is a billboard."

She laughed: he had answered her silent thought. "Selling what and to whom? We haven't seen a car or a house for an hour."

"That's what I don't like about it." He bent forward a little, his hands on the wheel; he was frowning. "Look at that road."

The long strip of concrete was bleached to the powdery gray of bones left on a desert, as if sun and snows had eaten away the traces of tires, oil and carbon, the lustrous polish of motion. Green weeds rose from the angular cracks of the concrete. No one had used the road or repaired it for many years; but the cracks were few.

"It's a good road," said Rearden. "It was built to last. The man who built it must have had a good reason for expecting it to carry a heavy traffic in the years ahead."

"Yes …"

"I don't like the looks of this."

"I don't either." Then she smiled. "But think how often we've heard people complain that billboards ruin the appearance of the countryside. Well, there's the unruined countryside for them to admire." She added, "They're the people I hate."

Their attitude toward "unruined countyside" was that toward the lack of any productive activity. That was what they wanted to see: a billboard would have been merely the least sign of it. The people that hate billboards, as such, are those that hate the productive activity of which they are a byproduct.

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I dislike them immensely, as they remind me of the worst kind of crass commercialism. However, a private landowner has the right to display whatever he likes on his property, be it a McDonalds billboard or a dead foetus.

Edited by Hal
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What precisely is crass commercialism?  How does it differ from regular commercialism?

It's more distasteful and generally involves advertising deliberately targetted at morons, such as half naked women holding cans of coke.

To be honest, 99% of advertising repulses me and it really is a blight on our society.

Edited by Hal
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I suppose it's necessary to make a distinction here: while I dislike many of the actual billboards I've seen (for most of the same reasons as Hal has described), I have no problem with the concept of billboards. That any particular billboard, or many of them, may be poorly designed or generally in poor taste is a question of the bad esthetic sense of the designer/advertiser, not the fault of the billboard itself.

Referring again to the case of Dangy and Rearden, clearly they weren't referring to any particular billboard or billboards, but to what they represented, conceptually.

Edited by Evangelical Capitalist
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I suppose it's necessary to make a distinction here: while I dislike many of the actual billboards I've seen (for most of the same reasons as Hal has described), I have no problem with the concept of billboards.  That any particular billboard, or many of them, may be poorly designed or generally in poor taste is a question of the bad esthetic sense of the designer/advertiser, not the fault of the billboard itself.

Correct. By Hal's logic, Howard Roark should have hated buildings because most of them were "crass."

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