Article:

Death, beauty, and iconoclastic nostalgia: Precarious aesthetics and Lana Del Rey

The obsolescence of analogue media along with a rapid succession of digital formats has sensitised us to the mortality of media. It has also spawned what Dominik Schrey has called ‘a golden age of nostalgia for these allegedly “dead media”’, now explored by visual artists, filmmakers, cinematographers, Do-It-Yourself enthusiasts, Polaroid fans, Instagram users, music video directors and others. Since the mid-1990s a partially-iconoclastic impulse focused on exploring the mortality of media materials has often taken the form of medium-specific noise. However, in recent years alternative strategies that counteract clarity, involving iconoclastic disruptions of the process of mediation, supported by a host of degrading techniques and strategies that thicken and foreground the medium and its materiality, have partially replaced uses of medium-specific noise.