Elizabeth Goodspeed on the rise of aesthetic labeling in visual culture

Elizabeth Goodspeed examines the contemporary trend of categorizing images into named aesthetics online, arguing that this practice compresses complex visual culture into searchable labels. She traces the history of artistic naming from Dadaism and Fauvism to modern terms like "palewave" and "indie sleaze," noting how names like "art deco" succeeded while "austerity/binge" faded. Goodspeed highlights the role of platforms like 4chan and TikTok in generating labels, and the influence of trend forecasters like Death to Stock and research collectives like Cari. She warns that AI image generators further flatten aesthetics into keyword-driven aggregates, citing "hippie" as an example. Designer Michael Oswell describes this as a shift toward "keywordability," while cyberethnographer Ruby Thelot invokes Édouard Glissant's concept of "opacity" as resistance to classification. Goodspeed concludes that naming can both clarify and obscure, with labels like Cari's "Utopian Scholastic" preserving historical specificity.