“What aesthetic is this?”

Elizabeth Goodspeed digs into how labeling a visual trend can flatten and demean it.

My newest It’s Nice That column is about visual trends, the rise of taxonomic warfare, and what gets flattened when culture becomes searchable infrastructure.

To ask this question at all is a sign of a relatively new cultural assumption: that every image belongs to a coherent and nameable category.

See also music genres 🤔