Arts and Culture: From Loos to Likes

From Loos to Likes

An essay on Adolf Loos, digital art, platform culture, and the economy of performed relevance.

Adolf Loos saw ornament as a cultural and economic mechanism. It consumed labour, material, money, and time. It also accelerated obsolescence by tying objects to fashions designed to expire.

More than a century later, the mechanism remains active. Its resources have changed.

Today, ornament consumes attention, creative energy, computational power, and endless hours spent packaging work for circulation. It appears in thumbnails, hooks, filters, captions, trends, engagement strategies, and all the other layers added because the work has been told it cannot survive without them.

The ornament of the digital era is performed relevance.

It is any aesthetic or rhetorical layer added primarily to make something appear current, visible, desirable, or culturally fluent, while remaining disconnected from the internal reason for the work.

This ornament can be loud. It can also wear Helvetica and sit inside a large white room.

The issue has never been how much form exists.

The issue is whether the form has a reason to exist.

Adolf Loos’ Ornament and Crime, traditionally dated to 1908 although scholarship places the development and first delivery of the lecture closer to 1910, has often been reduced to a simple rejection of decoration.[1]

His accusation was wider.

For Loos, ornament wasted labour because the worker was rarely compensated for the extra time required to produce it. It wasted material because decoration demanded additional fabrication. It wasted money because fashionable surfaces caused useful objects to appear obsolete long before they stopped functioning.

A chair could still hold a body.

The culture surrounding it had already decided that its pattern was dead.

This was the crime.

History usually remembers the few people who mastered a style. We lovingly quote the major names of Art Nouveau and the Vienna Secession, while the wider ecosystem of mediocre imitators disappears from view. Their work faded for the same reason most copies fade. They copy-copied until the original gesture became decorative residue.

Premonitions of the Xerox machine.

Loos directed much of his criticism toward recognised designers and applied artists attempting to construct a modern ornamental language. Still, the countless weaker imitations surrounding them reveal the larger problem. Once a style becomes a shortcut to cultural legitimacy, repetition multiplies faster than meaning.

The flower remains.

The reason for the flower disappears.

Loos cannot be borrowed innocently.

The rhetoric of Ornament and Crime relied on racialised evolutionary hierarchies, criminal anthropology, and the idea that some cultures represented earlier stages of human development.[2] He connected ornament with childhood, criminality, degeneration, and the people he classified as culturally “primitive.”

These ideas were part of a wider European intellectual climate. Their historical context explains them. It does not absolve them.

Loos used the absence of ornament as evidence of the modern European man’s cultural advancement. Restraint became a badge of superiority. The supposedly undecorated surface carried its own social message.

In other words, Loos criticised ornament as a performance of status while using the rejection of ornament to perform status.

This contradiction makes him useful now.

He understood that surfaces could operate as social credentials. He also proved that reduction could become a credential of its own.

Ornament does not always arrive covered in flowers and gold. Sometimes it arrives as white walls, raw concrete, monochrome branding, perfect grids, and a black turtleneck.

Minimalism can become costume.

Restraint can become decoration.

A lack of ornament can become extremely ornamental when it exists mainly to announce taste.

Fin-de-siècle Vienna was changing rapidly. Industrialisation, new technologies, expanding consumer culture, and shifting social classes created a city caught between inherited authority and modern ambition.

Cultural legitimacy still belonged to institutions, gatekeepers, salons, patrons, critics, and established codes of taste.

A façade could function as a résumé.

You could add a mythological reference, sprinkle in your emperor-grandfather’s military conquests, wrap everything in floral motifs, introduce a touch of anthropomorphism, and hope Vienna’s intellectual aristocracy paid attention.

Voilà.

You had entered the conversation.

The result was often visual overload followed by an absence of personal intention. Historical references were stacked until authorship disappeared. The façade spoke constantly, although nobody could tell who was speaking.

The twenty-first-century façade is the profile.

People decorate their identities to remain visible, employable, desirable, fundable, and culturally legible. Personal branding turns experience into architecture. Strategic vulnerability becomes a window treatment. Professional optimism covers the load-bearing walls.

Every profile needs a cornice.

Every career needs floral motifs.

Every personal crisis needs the correct carousel template.

The ornament has migrated from the object to the self.

The visual saturation Loos criticised surrounds us.

Its delivery system has changed.

His ornament was carved, painted, engraved, woven, and hammered into physical matter. Ours arrives through pixels and refreshes several times per second.

Hashtags. Reels. Thumbnails. Trending sounds. Filters. Hooks. Content strategies. Engagement bait. Faces frozen into expressions of emergency. Captions presenting every minor update as a turning point in human civilisation.

Everything has to scream before the system grants it the opportunity to be ignored.

The ruling class has also changed shape. It now includes recommendation systems, marketplace rankings, search results, collectors, curators, founders, advertisers, engagement metrics, and thousands of strangers moving their thumbs during lunch.

This system rewards immediate recognition.

It needs familiar forms capable of interrupting the scroll. Once a visual code proves effective, it is copied, packaged, taught, sold, automated, and exhausted.

The cycle resembles the ornamental economies Loos attacked:

A new visual language appears.

Institutions reward it.

Producers repeat it.

The repetition becomes a shortcut to legitimacy.

The shortcut becomes a formula.

The formula becomes waste.

Late nineteenth-century clutter returns in twenty-first-century clothes.

The contemporary ornament cannot be defined through visual excess alone.

A glitch can carry meaning.

A decorative pattern can belong to the internal logic of a work.

A cheap filter can become formally necessary.

Beautifully written code can become ballast.

A technically sophisticated artwork can remain empty.

A crude meme can contain years of collective history.

The relevant distinction concerns necessity.

Ornament begins when an element exists primarily to imitate relevance, without developing a meaningful relationship with the work’s subject, method, context, or intention.

The surface announces that something contemporary happened to the image.

Chrome was added.

Scan lines appeared.

The colour channels separated.

The typeface became vaguely nostalgic.

An AI model liquefied the face.

The work now carries the cosmetic evidence of current tools.

The surface performs relevance.

Nothing underneath has moved.

This is the fine line between studying form and faking it.

In my view, twenty-first-century art rests on three pillars:

Intent. Form. Function.

Intent establishes the reason for the work.

Form gives that reason a perceptible body.

Function describes what the work does once it enters a context.

None of these elements can validate an artwork independently.

Sincerity alone cannot guarantee quality. A person can genuinely intend to create something profound and still produce a derivative or incoherent result.

Formal skill cannot guarantee consequence. A perfectly executed image can remain culturally and emotionally empty.

Function cannot guarantee value. An artwork can circulate everywhere and say almost nothing.

The relationship between the three matters.

Intent needs form because an idea without a body remains private.

Form needs intent because technique without direction can collapse into demonstration.

Function emerges through the encounter between the work, its context, and its audience.

A conceptual root gives the process somewhere to begin.

That root can be personal, political, therapeutic, ridiculous, or difficult to explain. It can begin with curiosity. It can begin with irritation. It can begin when somebody opens MS Paint and decides that today is the day a badly drawn frog becomes culturally significant.

The root still needs a shape.

Something visible, audible, spatial, tactile, interactive, or memorable.

Imagine a politically charged artwork whose central message is peace.

Peace where?

Peace under whose conditions?

Peace for whom?

Peace enforced by whom?

Peace after what?

Form gives specificity to the universal. It determines whether peace arrives through a photograph, an empty room, a monumental sculpture, a badly compressed meme, a painting, a broken interface, or a glitched video that refuses to stabilise.

Intent begins the inquiry.

Form establishes its conditions.

Function connects it to the world.

Digital art must survive transmission.

Once uploaded or minted, the artwork enters a grid, feed, marketplace, search result, or timeline. It receives a thumbnail, caption, price, number of views, number of likes, number of owners, and a position inside a ranking system.

The infrastructure places radically different objects inside the same architecture.

A painting becomes a post.

A film becomes a preview.

A sculpture becomes a JPEG.

A personal crisis becomes content.

This does not change the artwork’s essence. It changes the conditions under which the artwork is encountered.

The platform treats the work as content because the platform only understands comparable units.

It can measure clicks, impressions, watch time, retention, sales, and conversion. It has no reliable metric for sincerity, artistic risk, conceptual depth, cultural memory, or consequence.

It knows what travelled.

It cannot know what mattered.

Reach therefore belongs to the distribution system. It cannot serve as the final function of the artwork.

An artwork can function as private therapy, political pressure, collective memory, entertainment, historical evidence, speculative asset, social ritual, inside joke, or entrance into a community.

Several of these functions can coexist.

Problems begin when circulation becomes the dominant purpose before the work has discovered its own form.

Dimensions follow the platform.

Rhythm follows retention.

Language follows discoverability.

Emotional temperature follows engagement data.

The distribution system begins designing the artwork before the artist does.

The combination of hyper-targeted marketing, marketplaces designed around abundance, and our relentless thirst for validation pushes everything toward the same performance.

Every object presents itself as potential art.

Every artwork presents itself as potential content.

Every piece of content demands recognition as an event.

We confuse reach with worth.

We confuse exposure with intention.

We confuse circulation with consequence.

Metrics are useful. They describe movement.

They become dangerous when movement is interpreted as cultural value.

A work can receive no attention and remain important.

A work can dominate attention and remain empty.

History has never distributed relevance fairly. The algorithm has not corrected this flaw. It has accelerated it and added a dashboard.

Loos drew a firm boundary between utilitarian objects and autonomous art. His critique concerned useful objects subjected to unnecessary ornament, while art occupied a different cultural territory.[3]

Digital culture has spent decades destabilising those categories.

The kids wanted to play.

And play they did.

They scribbled memes.

They made abstract digital paintings in MS Paint, including some of the most honest digital work I have ever seen.

They hijacked engineering software to sculpt weird, broken beauty.

They used spreadsheets as drawing tools.

They corrupted files deliberately.

They glitched images, broke interfaces, reassembled screenshots, and forced software to perform tasks its developers never intended.

A digital renaissance grew from misuse.

The tool stopped dictating the category.

A painting could move.

A sculpture could exist as code.

A meme could become folklore.

A software malfunction could become an artistic method.

A collectible could become entry into a community.

This is what happens whenever culture becomes too tightly managed. Artists find the emergency exit, climb through a broken window, and drag the tools outside.

Function changes because culture changes.

The artwork develops new uses, audiences, methods of circulation, and forms of social life. Its identity becomes unstable.

That instability is one of digital art’s greatest strengths.

Consider a glitched-out Pepe on a green horse riding into a neon sunset.

Is it decoration?

A manifesto?

A cry for identity?

A joke whose context requires six years of uninterrupted internet exposure?

Probably all of the above.

Marketed successfully, it can also become a speculative asset. Embedded deeply enough in a community, it can operate as a landmark of cultural identity and collective memory.

The image can be stupid and historically meaningful at the same time.

The internet has never struggled with that combination.

Its significance depends on the relationship between the image, its context, its maker, and the culture through which it moves.

A Pepe created inside that culture carries a different pressure from one assembled after a marketing report identified an emerging opportunity in frog liquidity.

The difference can be difficult to quantify.

The other Pepes can tell.

The fake Pepe gets exiled. It joins the other fake Pepes. Together, they establish a subculture based on their shared exile.

Five derivative subcultures later, everybody is exhausted, overstimulated, and closing the tab.

This does not mean we have enough Pepes on horses.

We need more.

Seriously.

A Pepe still has to earn its horse.

Otherwise, the digital renaissance turns into automated regurgitation, squeezing the final drops from fifteen minutes that ended three trends ago.

Web3 can support originality.

Its infrastructure allows artists to distribute work directly, establish relationships with collectors, construct niche communities, experiment with ownership, and circulate forms that conventional institutions might ignore.

The same infrastructure can intensify imitation at industrial speed.

Speculation rewards repetition.

Artificial scarcity can disguise an absence of ideas.

Marketplaces built around abundance make works interchangeable.

Community language becomes marketing language.

Successful aesthetics become templates before they have time to develop into histories.

Web3 remains useful because its outcome has not been fully decided.

Calling it a refuge would be too comfortable.

It contains the conditions for experimentation and the mechanisms capable of destroying those conditions.

Its cultural value depends on maintaining the relationship between intent, form, and function.

Once packaging becomes the central reason for the object’s existence, we are cooked.

Loos identified ornament as an external economy taking control of the useful object.

Fashion attached itself to function.

Status attached itself to material.

Decoration accelerated obsolescence and demanded additional labour from the people producing it.

The contemporary mechanism follows the same direction.

The economy of visibility takes control of cultural production.

Platform requirements attach themselves to form.

Engagement expectations attach themselves to expression.

Trend cycles accelerate obsolescence and demand continuous labour from the people trying to remain visible.

The crime has survived.

It did not return in reverse.

Its interface changed.

Loos confronted objects buried under fashionable surfaces. We confront artworks gradually redesigned around the requirements of circulation.

In both cases, an external system colonises form.

The contemporary ornament is the thumbnail that dictates the image behind it. It is the hook that becomes more important than the thought. It is the effect applied because the trend requires evidence of participation. It is the personal identity continuously renovated to satisfy a system that forgets everything by tomorrow morning.

Loos wanted the chair released from decorative compulsion.

The contemporary artist needs the artwork released from compulsory performance.

Loos wanted a chair to be a chair.

I want form to be form, before the algorithm turns it into a format.

Notes

[1] Christopher Long, “The Origins and Context of Adolf Loos’s ‘Ornament and Crime,’” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 68, no. 2 (June 2009): 200–223. Long challenges the conventional 1908 dating and reconstructs the essay’s complicated lecture and publication history.

[2] Jimena Canales and Andrew Herscher, “Criminal Skins: Tattoos and Modern Architecture in the Work of Adolf Loos,” Architectural History 48 (2005): 235–256. The authors examine the relationship between Loos’ argument, nineteenth-century criminal anthropology, tattooing, racial hierarchy, and modern architectural thought.

[3] Andreas Vrahimis, “Wittgenstein, Loos, and the Critique of Ornament,” Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 58, no. 2 (2021): 144–159. Vrahimis discusses Loos’ distinction between autonomous art, practical objects, architecture, and historically appropriate forms of ornament.