There is too much beauty in the world. There is too much beauty and there are more beautiful people than there have ever been, and they are generally beautiful in the same way. With trompe l’oeil make-up, fillers, and photo editing, they began to give themselves the same face and to make the same kinds of images of themselves. They are becoming images. They tend toward the same ideal (worked out, contoured, airbrushed, fake) image, they bombard the world with that image relentlessly, every day, and that image continues to infinity. In Soho in London last winter, I had dinner with a beauty editor, a stylist, and a fashion photographer. The photographer, showing us something on her phone, casually observed that her Instagram for you page was full of monsters. That is what she was recommended, videos of monsters. Oh yeah, the very successful beauty editor said, that’s what I have too. They showed me.

There are AI-generated monsters stalking Instagram Reels. Hideous ghouls are emerging from footage of real places: hairless swimming cats with the shrunken heads of elderly Chinese women; the autophagic flayed salmon-man god greedily consuming his own lurid orange flesh; a giddy-eyed, ticklish, mischievous raccoon goblin spirit having his sponge bath. Beauty is boring, so we turn to the grotesque. The Instagram mainstream is transmuted into a Matthew Barney film. My for you page was once filled with conventionally beautiful girls. That was what Meta’s engineers showed other men whose predilections and desires they had not yet figured out. They had a vague idea of my sexuality and my preferences regarding hair color, body type, and skin tone, but nothing more. These days, it is just full of junk. But, one night in Berlin, I remembered that I had access to a clean work account that had never been used for anything other than promoting arts events. I went to the explore page; it was crawling with monsters. These creations cannot be found in mythology, but are chimeric beings made in novel combinations of humans, animals, and other things. They take new forms and are a new form of expression. They are different to anything that came before, yet also a continuation of the oldest traditions.

For a while now, I have been collecting images that approach a new aesthetic of the present. One that is undignified, gross, deformed, or otherwise repulsive ...

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