This is an installment of Visual Studies, a series that explores how images move through and shape culture.
not many people know this, but images have small hairs called cilia on the edges that propel them through the cultural medium
when images find a suitable food source, they concentrate and begin secreting a variety of polymers that harden into a thick shell, shaping the culture and ultimately forming an ideological superstructure
TIL
He just likes gold stuff, thinks it looks fancy. It isn’t consistently rococo.
And it’s no worse than any other presidential palace shit.
Just outside his office there’s even a copy of his mug shot printed on the front page of The New York Post.
Let’s go downtown and watch the modern kids
Let’s go downtown and talk to the modern kids
They will eat right out of your hand
Using great big words that they don’t understand They singing
Rococo, rococo, rococo, rococo Rococo, rococo, rococo, rococo
They build it up just to burn it back down
They build it up just to burn it back down
The wind is blowing all the ashes around
Oh my dear god what is that horrible song they’re singing
Rococo, rococo, rococo, rococo Rococo, rococo, rococo, rococo
Rococo’s most enduring trait has been its embrace by the bourgeoisie. By replacing marble and gold with stucco and gilded bronze, the ornamental splendor once reserved for gods and kings was now available to merchants and a growing middle class. Rococo was itself revolutionary, in part because it upset the established hierarchy by making molded plaster look as good as solid gold. Four hundred years on, its cheap extravagance is still simultaneously elitist and democratic. Use it as a commoner and you can feel like a king. Use it as a king and it might just get you guillotined.
this reminded me that peelon and grimey got together because one of them made a “rococo’s basilisk” joke. i am cursed with this knowledge, and now you are too.
What if he was undoubtedly gouache because he was a painting?
I thought one of the silver linings of Trump 2.0 would be destruction of the NYT, but they’ve pivoted to fast