The hope is that today’s ongoing demolition of taste and further emptying of images of meaning might clear a path for new kinds of strangeness or beauty, that it will return to images some of the mystery that has been lost and give them some new, or a very old power.

Though fake, the Vulgar Image is a more honest reflection of how we are inside and how the world really is than the photograph in the news or the painting on the wall. It shows life as it has become, meaningless, absurd, and misshapen. In short: it is about collapsing reality.

The Vulgar Image reflects the artificial and desireless qualities of the present. It is pornography for a society that is losing its lust and physicality, and it is very perverse, more perverse than tired old pornography, because it has such an unnatural relationship with the body and with fantasy. It is distanced from the fleshly, just as people,... See more

When pornography is endless and freely available, when what was once considered deviant is now celebrated, when everything is accepted and there are very few sexual taboos left, then sexual vulgarity, innuendo, and transgression become almost impossible. When nothing is left to the imagination, there is nothing left to be surprised by.

The Earth is a camera, so realism must be abandoned, and so must be the convincing illusion.

This century, content has overridden style all over – but here are very dumb images without content made in unpleasant styles. Here are counterweights to all the polite mediocrity, the unbearably literal messaging, the great deluge of information, the rationalized views of a world that can no longer be explained. Instead of refinement, there is... See more

The Vulgar Image is made out of everything. It is made of the internet, it is all the endless content of the everlasting now, exploded. It is made of information, but it imparts no information. It is meaningless and completely illegible. In a world that is all information, these are images without content, cobbled together out of nothing and... See more

The Vulgar Image is the expression of machines, and those who have had their brains scrambled by machines. It is the true image of our time: the image of how we are corrupted and changed by images.

To thrive in the new world with all its accelerating complexity and overproduction, it suggests, one must either be a genius or a braindead, unthinking moron – and, by the same token, to make the most brilliant and sophisticated artworks, or the dumbest, most off-putting content possible. Bad taste is a way of standing out when there are too many... See more