"What aesthetic is this?" Elizabeth Goodspeed on the push to categorise visual culture

"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. An image may once have been worth a thousand words. Now it needs just one."

"Today, images increasingly get treated less as singular works than as pieces of a broader aesthetic puzzle. Online, images rarely appear in isolation. They appear in feeds, on moodboards, and as algorithmically grouped clusters, all of which train viewers to read visual resemblance as evidence of broader affil"

"Before photography and mass printing, images were physical objects. Most people would encounter only a limited number across their daily lives, each produced slowly and often by hand. The most common image forms - religious paintings, royal portraits, state propaganda - did not require aesthetic labels to make sense. Their role and meaning were already broadly understood by the communities they circulated within."

"The expansion of print culture, photography, magazines, television, and eventually the internet radically transformed the relationship between people and images. Daily life was quickly flooded with intangible visual matter that circulated at unprecedented scale and speed. And as images multiplied, so did the need to group and describe them."

Online images are increasingly framed through searchable aesthetic categories rather than as standalone works. A growing question—“what aesthetic is this?”—often goes unanswered, reflecting an assumption that every image fits a coherent, nameable type. Earlier image culture relied on physical objects and shared community meanings, so labels were often unnecessary. Print culture, photography, mass media, and the internet multiplied visual content and increased the need for grouping and description. As images spread through feeds, moodboards, and algorithmic clusters, viewers learn to treat visual similarity as proof of broader affiliation. This approach can narrow how creativity is understood and what gets lost when naming replaces interpretation.

Read at Itsnicethat