Aesthetic Trend Alert: the Grotesque

where to put the bum

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time but am moved to write about it because of this article this week on It’s Nice That that outlines an emergent trend in illustration toward the grotesque.

Featuring artists Beth Frey, Bijijoo, Doraloig, Ram Han, Sawako Kabuki, and SillDA among others, the article describes a contemporary milieu of artistic production that embraces “clashing colours, exaggerated textures, and revolting motifs that disturb and draw you in at the same time.”

I like this quote from Ram Han, who says she started toward the visceral in response to the “emptiness” of some forms of 3D imagery, so she wanted “to express virtual senses such as feeling soft and squishy when touched, or sharp and painful when pricked, or warm and cold.”

Case in point: Ram Han: Hairball Cake with Nosebleed (Copyright © Ram Han, 2022)

Some ideas about why this trend is emerging: (1) As a response to the crazy and disgusting times we live in, where we seek something in art that is even worse than we are seeing in reality; (2) we desire to reconnect with bodily experience in contrast to the sterility and mental abstraction of our screens; (3) or “fear, unease, and a slight sense of discomfort” have been shown by researchers to be more captivating than other images.

But in general I think there’s something intrinsic to AI imagery that is grotesque-adjacent. It’s about the effect on visual culture when the machines reach into their latent spaces and produce monsterously distorted, hyper-real surprise aberrations that beguile, horrify, and entertain us. They do it because one of the most fundamental things that AI doesn’t understand is the physical human form, ie where to put the bum.

Beth Frey: Untitled AI image, generated by DALLE-3 and Bing Image Generator (Copyright © Beth Frey, 2023)

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