essay
by ALEPH MOLINARI
In his introduction to A Universal History of Infamy, Jorge Luis Borges describes the end of an era as a baroque manifestation, characterized by an oversaturation of style in the arts. From the Gothic art and architecture of the 14th and 15th centuries to the Churrigueresque architecture of the 17th century Spanish Baroque, from the French Rococo to the Symbolist and Aesthetic movements at the end of the 19th century, these excesses of style ultimately sought to exhaust their own possibilities and, prophetically, foreshadowed the end of their respective eras. The origin of the term “baroque” stems from barroco, the 16th-century Portuguese word for an irregularly shaped pearl. By extension, the term came to describe a beauty rooted in the unpredictable, the excessive, and the strange. Ultimately, the baroque favors extension rather than depth; it’s a style of continuous expansion.
Today, the explosion of digital…