Raúl de Nieves at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Too much decoration is a terrible thing. We call it “gaudy” or “garish” or “lurid” or “vulgar” no longer arranged but vomited in quantity, too much, like the clowns on view who baroque their face to comical levels found frightening, a rupture of the socially decorous. Because these are ethnocentric terms, wielding the symbolic violence of “taste,” and such it is rare museums didactic their greek statuary with “this greek marble would have actually been caked in makeup like a whore” preserving both the marble and myth of white antiquity. The myth of white antiquity that believes in the raw lineage that gives us aluminum Macbooks and UberBlack as opposed to the lesser Ubers which come in colors disorganized. Sontag wrote the word camp and it suddenly allowed the intelligentsia to participate in the kitsch with the shield of irony, but if you weren’t, if you couldn’t, what then if these were just garish.