Girl with pitbull, bands of cash. The radiance of heaven. Being a teen. Gummy, chewy, delicious. Pink. Meme. Foucault and the way Foucault writes. Absurd extinction! Pagan root. Western civilization and liking it. Not like a boy likes it, but like a boy who is always posting pictures of the girls he wants to be likes it. Esoteric Pinterest. Diagram of slave tech, bedazzled snapback. Not afraid, not not afraid.
We can’t speak of “internet aesthetics” exactly, but we can speak of certain branches. The references above comprise one of them—you may recognize its influence when looking at British artist Craig Boagey’s paintings, now on view in the solo exhibition “Spirit Economy” at Lower East Side gallery Amanita. Or not.
The internet encourages a form of assemblage, where users collect images, memes, and bits of information under particular themes. In the Tumblr era, this practice was referred to as a user’s “aesthetic”; more recently, on TikTok, this indexing is marked by the suffix “-core” (as in cottagecore). This impulse finds its outlet on every social media platform, from Instagram’s “saved” tab to platforms dedicated to such collections, like Are.na or Pinterest. To see someone else’s curated hoard is a very personal kind of poetry. It’s also a kind of folk art: There are recognizable forms, a movement for a certain kind of reference. And yet, these aesthetic assemblages aren’t often critically examined. Few, if any, are questioning the message embedded in a mood board. What is its history, context, medium, or intent? Boagey’s new paintings at Amanita—lush and exquisitely executed—take seriously this practice by forming assemblages of his own. In doing so, they treat seemingly disposable internet ephemera as cultural documents, the resulting compositions producing an image of a falling empire, dripping in heart reacts.
Take The All Thing (2025), in which a giant pink paw dominates the canvas. Scattered across the canvas are other, tightly contained images: a chihuahua in a platinum blonde wig, a glossy mushroom, a compass, a still from YouTube’s first-ever video (“Me at the Zoo”), what looks like a Christian icon, a memex (the proto-internet machine proposed by Vannevar Bush in 1945), a king confronting an automaton, and in the top left, a diagram. It’s Move 37 by AlphaGo—the AI developed by Google DeepMind—made famous during its 2016 match against Go master Lee Sedol. The move shocked Sedol and other observers for displaying an “inhuman intelligence.” AlphaGo ended up defeating Sedol in four out of five matches.
Craig Boagey, The All Thing, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 74 3/4 x 63 in.
Like The All Thing, Boagey’s paintings pulse with a rhythm of references swinging between the cute (kittens), the feminine (baddies), and the aspirational (being hot and having money), set against the machinic, the masculine, and the esoteric. The “cute” or “feminine” elements like plump, juicy lips and plush, soft fur operate like visual ASMR, provoking a sensual desire to consume. The machinic images, by contrast—mostly diagrams related to cognition or Apple patents—operate at a different register. Their niche quality generates a sense of foreboding difficult to name or locate. Ancient artifacts serve as mediators between these poles—blank and potent with mana.
These references feel adjacent to the aesthetic worlds of nu-spiritualism, angelicism01, Remilia, and other cult-like internet communities developed on platforms like Twitter and Instagram before bleeding into downtown scenes in London and New York during and after the pandemic. While the media fervor around those communities has died down, their particular mode of reference juxtaposition is still quite active culturally.
Take Grimes’s latest music video for Artificial Angels, in which a blonde goth anime girl (Misa Amane, from the manga Death Note, known to be a favorite character of Elon Musk. Ew) holds a gun and speaks in that AI-generated choral voice: “This is what it’s like to be hunted by something smarter than you.” Her mini skirt ripples above her thighs. Then Grimes appears, in all her e-girl glory: pigtails, oversized glasses, flushed cheeks and lips—infantile but erotic—and, of course, holding a gun. It’s not an exact match but it rhymes.
Yet the question remains: Why see the world like this? Why this nest of references? What has produced a world where this sensibility is not only possible, but pervasive.
It is perhaps news to no one that our current stage of late capitalism increasingly has no need for workers. As theorists like McKenzie Wark, Tiziana Terranova, Shoshana Zuboff, and Jodi Dean have argued, the attention economy, molded by big tech platforms, has transformed behaviors once seen as “not work” into new sites of capital accumulation. Online communication has become its own form of productive labor, generating both saleable data and the valuable content that attracts users to populate a platform and thus, generate more data. Boagey’s paintings reflect this shift, indexing how so much of our world now boils down to two forces: desire and control.
This dynamic is no more apparent than in our current AI-fueled economy. Investment in AI, whose use cases are still fuzzy at best, has added more to US GDP growth this year than consumer spending. The capital flooding into AI has helped mask a brewing recession, even as layoffs and inflation mount. So far, AI’s most lucrative applications appear to be producing increasingly deadly weaponry—on display in Israel’s war in Gaza—and hyper-tailored porn. Just last month, OpenAI’s Sam Altman announced that ChatGPT will begin offering erotica to paid subscribers come December in what looks like a desperate bid to keep the bubble from popping. The absurdity of the system has never been more apparent, outpaced only by its capacity for violence. It’s that contradiction—between the palatability of objects made for consumption and its greater costs—that animates this form of aesthetic collection. The accumulated result, when seen online, is a disturbing kind of manic nihilism that delights in the collapse of meaning.
Craig Boagey, Prudent Faith, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 78 3/4 x 66 7/8 in.
Yet Boagey’s paintings are not merely “meme” paintings which copy their source and its message. The beauty of these kinds of assemblage is that, even as a sensibility is shared, each person brings their own reference and feeling for interpretation. Boagey does this, of course, through his own research process, mediated by his particular concerns. Threaded through these images are lines of poetry that reflect on doubles, refraction, and reanimation, which instill an energetic distance between Boagey and the perspective he is representing—one which is often darkly contagious. Boagey’s painstaking realization of each collection—precisely materialized through stencils, airbrush, and hand painting—pushes the viewer to take the aesthetic assemblages of online communities critically. And that’s not nihilistic at all.
Editor’s note: This story is the latest edition of Link Rot, a new column by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei that explores the intersections of art, technology, and the internet.
