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

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.

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

They are Vulgar Images. They share certain qualities: they are figurative, tasteless, illegible, stupid, fake, disembodied, grotesque, transformed. Some are ludicrously offensive, but it is unlikely that many are that offended by them, as the event horizon of trolling was crossed some while ago. They are also extremely contemporary images.

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.

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 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.

There is mutual animosity between the high and low arts. The majority of internet culture is low-brow, populist, and made in knowing or dumb opposition to high art and culture’s aesthetic and moral values. Contemporary art, likewise, no longer has or seeks to have a connection with popular visual culture. While traditional folk and outsider art... See more