We all saw it happen: our feeds flooded with “Ghibli-style” graphics. Streets, cats, friends, politicians—everyone rendered in that soft, nostalgic glow of a cartoon fantasy. The world looked like it had temporarily forgotten that context even exists. Aesthetic arrived with a bang, and no one seemed to care what got lost along the way. Rather than joining the collective sighs of delight, I waited. And thought: maybe this isn’t just innocent fun, but a symptom of a much deeper cultural reboot.

Contemporary visual culture lives in “copy & paste” mode. Works of art, images, music—all circulate detached from their original contexts, as if meaning were just unnecessary baggage. Remix? Sure. But this creative freedom sometimes feels like assembling IKEA furniture without instructions. Something holds together, but is that really the point?

The world now resembles TikTok on a macro scale. We scroll through culture. Nothing holds us for long. A song? Sounds nice—onto the playlist. An image? Cool—save it. A style? Let’s repeat it. Context? Right—what context, again?

Remix taught us to treat works like Lego blocks—citations, references, samples, shuffled and reshuffled. But when everything is a quote, something begins to creak. Especially when the context evaporates, leaving only a pretty façade. Concept albums lost to playlists? Standard practice. Narrative cohesion, crushed under the weight of algorithmic suggestion. And yes, I do it too. We all do. But maybe that says something about the way we consume culture now.

And this isn’t just about music. Art, film, imagery—they’ve all become remixable material. Remix democratizes creation, no doubt. But a work stripped of its context and reframed in a new aesthetic often ends up meaning... not much. The style remains. The rest gets lost.

This isn’t about provocation or deconstruction. There’s no game being played, no wink to the audience. Just scroll, copy-paste, an aesthetic quote drained of substance. On a chillout playlist, no one asks what narrative the sound came from. It’s enough that it doesn’t interrupt your coffee. We just take what’s “pretty.” Style becomes its own entity. Ornamental layer. Gilding on an empty frame.

But it’s not just technology to blame. It’s a shift in how we process culture. The image culture rewards immediacy. An image that requires reading doesn’t stand a chance against one that just looks nice. Does it move us? Irritate? Provoke? Anything? Or are we just checking off another “aesthetic experience” from an endless list?

Jean Baudrillard wrote about a world of signs without meaning. Today we have images without stories, aesthetics without ideas, narratives without narrative. We make pastiches of pastiches—decorative visuals that pretend to signify something. Memes, graphics, stylizations—until all reference to reality vanishes. Baudrillard called it the triumph of simulacra: signs unmoored from the original.

AI only speeds this up. Algorithm-generated images can be genuinely beautiful. But are they more than stylized data mashups? Can they really say something? Or are they just exquisitely arranged pixels? What we have is simulacrum without original—a work severed from any context beyond visual similarity to known templates. It’s Baudrillard's world, realized: copies without originals, signs without content, pure form floating in circulation.

It’s a culture of fireworks. Beautiful, brief, forgettable. A focus on form at the expense of content. In the flood of visual stimuli, we lose our ability to follow a narrative. It’s all about the flash, not the thread. As if everything could be summarized in two seconds and a single frame.

In a culture ruled by the image, aesthetic is currency. To break through the noise, a message must be visually pleasing and instantly digestible. Simplified. Which means that good looks are increasingly mistaken for depth. Decontextualization breaks stories into particles. Something flashes past—but what was it?

Wouldn’t it be nice to read between images, listen between notes, know where something came from? Otherwise, we’re left with an empty frame, where everything is a quote from nowhere.

On the one hand, liberating content from its original frame allows for reinterpretation, creativity, even a kind of cultural dialogue. Technology and mass culture won’t slow down—we’re not naïve.

Remix culture can be fascinating. But things go awry when all that’s left is echo. And the question: does anyone even remember how the original sounded? Maybe that’s an outdated way to look at things. Still, decontextualization doesn’t have to mean the death of meaning—if we’re willing to reassign context to what seems severed. Even in a culture of remix and endless imagery, we might rediscover not just the surface, but the pulse underneath.

Sources:

Jean Baudrillard – Simulacra and Simulation
Walter Benjamin – The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Fredric Jameson – Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Illustrate Magazine – The Impact of Streaming Platforms on the Music Industry