Pimping the Enlightenment

Miles Klee analyses the use of Joseph Ducreux's 1793-era self-portrait as an image macro: "An immediate pleasure here is the tension of anachronistic pop sentiment couched in a vernacular that struggles with those meanings and destroys the stylized phrasing of the original text. … Ducreux's foppish accoutrements today reek of pimpage, of course, but the painting communicates with our moment on weirder wavelengths than that." [The Awl]