Extreme visual aesthetics respond to heightened media competition

Evidence

Extremism of visual aesthetics in the twenty-first century can be understood, film scholars Nicholas Baer et al. argue, “in response to heightened media competition” and often takes shape as “transgressive representations of graphic sex and brutal violence”—but we can add that it can also include spectacularized visual imagery irresolvable into acts like sex or violence. The splatter itself is the point: the recent worldwide rise in horror and gore dramatizes crises while literalizing the stream. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 237