Glitter: When Form becomes Content

The Art of Vibestition

It was a serene afternoon in the Portuguese countryside; an eclectic crowd of hippies and artists had gathered in an enchanted forest for a festival. The occasion was celebration and artistic exploration, and people dressed accordingly. The sartorial symphony of clashing patterns would have made a kaleidoscope blush. When I asked why Ketamine was explicitly forbidden (any other drug was tolerated), the "steward" responded that "people constantly bumping up is just not a look" while brushing aside his sumptuous mane. My initial reaction was aversion – shouldn't this be about experiences, not aesthetics? Yet, while this space obsessed over appearances, something deeper was going on too. The carefully curated vibes attracted genuine artists and skilled practitioners, creating an alchemical transformation where surface gave rise to substance.

This peculiar inversion – where aesthetic form generates authentic content – plays out across culture in subtle and profound ways. When pushed far enough, pure form has a way of giving rise to substance. This essay explores this phenomenon, which I call "Vibestition" – the process by which aesthetics bootstrap cultural movements into existence.

I’m here to laud appearances, facades, even fakery. This is an ode to glitter.

Sounds like cope? If you're involved in any subculture, you have likely been annoyed at wannabes merely adopting the aesthetics. If you’re a philosopher, you bristle at turtleneck-wearing poseurs carrying unread Hegel. If you’re a spiritual seeker, you roll your eyes at crystal-clutching Instagram mystics. The standard view is that social media and consumer capitalism have hollowed out cultural forms, turning belonging into mere consumption of identity markers. Yes, the gluttonous gobbling machine of capitalism is nibbling at culture itself.

Yet this dynamic between surface and substance is more complex than simple cultural appropriation. Sometimes, committed aesthetic mimicry leads to genuine understanding. The philosophy aficionado who starts with fashion choices might eventually crack open the Science of Logic. The festival-goer's careful curation of "spiritual vibes" could catalyze authentic practice. This isn't just "fake it till you make it" – it's a fundamental pattern in how cultural movements emerge and evolve.

The Dance of Mimicry

Every cultural scene has its copycats. The shallow exhibition of cultural forms to imitate substantive versions – the philosophy student's turtleneck, the crystal healer's Instagram aesthetic – is the process of memetic mimicry. This mimicry creates a curious dance between "posers" and "authentic" practitioners, between kitsch and the avant-garde. As cultural forms become legible to the mainstream, the avant-garde shifts to new territory. Fashion trends exemplify this: yesterday's counterculture becomes today's mall aesthetic.

Yet this process of aesthetic diffusion (see also Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths) serves multiple functions. It challenges depth to distinguish itself while simultaneously protecting valuable ideas behind a membrane of superficiality. More importantly, it creates paths for newcomers to discover substance through form. Fractal symmetry does show up in exotic states of consciousness, not just on t-shirts at festivals. Form holds signal – however faint – of the values it originally expressed.

This points to something deeper: what if the relationship between authenticity and imitation isn't as straightforward as we assume? To understand this, we need to look more closely at the nature of form itself.

The Beauty of Form

The concept of "kitsch" – mass-produced imitation of high culture – has been a favorite target of critics since Greenberg's 1939 essay. But drawing clear lines between authentic and inauthentic cultural expression misses something crucial: appearance is integral to being. From Plato's link between Truth and Beauty to evolution's use of aesthetic markers in sexual selection, form and substance are intimately connected.

Consider how beauty emerges from values in different contexts. Mathematical equations are called beautiful when they embody elegance and parsimony. Peacocks' tails signal genetic fitness through symmetry and vibrancy.

Aesthetics compress complex values

The distinct aesthetics of different subcultures, what they believe is beautiful, emerges from what they hold as valuable. Crystals are emblematic of the values of the New Age. Is it too far-fetched to say that a turtleneck is a philosophical garment in how it frames and elevates the head, creating an almost architectural support for the seat of reason?

Cultural forms – from corsets to sonnets – crystallize the aesthetic preferences of specific groups at specific times. This is how we get cultural forms from subcultural aesthetics: What is considered beautiful at a given time by a given group gets hardened into a repeatable form.

Forms crystallize aesthetics

This crystallization process (Values → Aesthetics → Forms) reveals a paradox: formal constraints catalyze creativity. The sonnet's fourteen lines or haiku's syllabic structure don't limit expression – they provide the necessary container for interesting content. If there are no constraints whatsoever, the playing field is overwhelmingly open. The paradox of choice reigns over the blank page. Working within a defined form channels creativity like a riverbed directs the flow of water.

Form also provides the resistance necessary for artistic innovation: Renaissance painters mastered perspective only for Cézanne to shatter it, giving birth to modernism. Abstract expressionists could rebel against representation precisely because representational rules existed to break. Each shift revealed changing values – from representationalism's focus on shared experience to abstract expressionism's pure subjectivity. This pattern repeats: aesthetic movements crystallize into forms, which then become launching pads for the next artistic revolution.

Form Becoming Content

The relationship between form and content is more fluid than it first appears. Form doesn't just contain content – it shapes and transforms it. The taste of a meal changes with its plating (see the study “A Taste of Kandinsky”). The unboxing experience affects product perception (good job, Apple). William S. Burroughs wore formal attire to modulate the reception of his radical ideas.

When pushed to its limit, the non-duality of content and form produces a
McLuhanesque shift:

Form becomes Content

Famous examples from art history include Warhol's soup cans and Duchamp's urinal. The presentation of commercial imagery or the lowest of sanitary installations as fine art transforms their meaning entirely.

This transformation of form into content is also at work for entire art movements: Impressionist brushstrokes speak of subjective experience. Dadaist collages embody fragmentation and nihilism in their very form.

Returning to Greenberg’s essay, it’s notable that he described Avant Garde art (the “true” art) as focusing on the medium itself rather than the subject matter. Kubrick’s black monolith that unlocks humanity’s evolutionary potential in “2001: A Space Odyssey” has the exact proportions of a cinema screen. Dogen Zenji taught that proper sitting is itself enlightenment.

This enantiodromia (Jung’s term for when things transform into their apparent opposites) makes Vibestition work: if you commit deeply enough to an aesthetic, authentic content inevitably emerges from that container. The philosophy poseur who takes their role seriously enough will eventually engage with the texts. The spiritual influencer who fully commits to their aesthetic performance is already going through the motions of spiritual practice.

The Art of Vibestition

Vibestition catalyzes emergence through aesthetics. While this might sound like Hyperstition – ideas becoming self-fulfilling through their spread – Vibestition works differently. Rather than propagating specific narratives, it creates aesthetic containers that communicate values to attract the right people. The interaction of these people will retroactively add depth to what started with pure surface.

Solarpunk exemplifies this: its aesthetic vision of harmonized nature and technology, combining retro-romanticism with futurism, attracts those who resonate with its underlying values of ecological harmony, techno-optimism, and human flourishing. Yes, Solarpunk is just vibes for now, but those vibes might bootstrap the right culture to make it real.

The most tangible manifestation of Vibestition appears in gatherings and temporary communities. Edge City, Zuzalu, VibeCamp, and similar pop-up villages demonstrate how aesthetic choices can attract specific combinations of people and create conditions for co-creation. These spaces don't dictate content – they provide forms that catalyze emergence. Vitalik, the Ethereum founder who initiated Zuzalu, explicitly wanted to test the “form factor” of two hundred people with aligned values living in a place for an extended duration. Putting out an aesthetic vision while defining a concrete form without defining the content - Vitalik was vibestitioning.

In order for Vibestition to work, the vibes need to be spot on, though. They will only manage to attract the people in the right mindset if there is deep emotional resonance. Since aesthetics are always the result of a whole tapestry of values, they can be widely different even if there is an overlap in values. Compare the following two images of gatherings, Edge City and Hereticon:

While both embrace techno-optimism and innovation, their aesthetic expressions diverge sharply. Edge City opts for subtle minimalism: red-clad figures ascending hills, anime-inspired imagery blending nature with wind turbines, and dreamy skyscapes suggesting possibility.

Hereticon, in contrast, goes maximalist – imagine Silicon Valley meets Dark Academia, where occult symbols and American exceptionalism collide. Two very different crowds of innovators were successfully summoned to the respective events.

New Forms, New Futures

The pop-up village may be the form most native to Vibestition – emphasizing temporary gathering, selective curation, and collaborative spaces. Just as Burning Man's values produced new practices like circling, these new containers might birth novel art forms reflecting their values.

This emergence feels particularly vital now, as contemporary art seems trapped in endless remixing and pastiche. Taped bananas and only thinly veiled ponzi games of collectors. The visual and auditory spaces feel thoroughly explored, societal critique exhausted, and norms thoroughly subverted. Empty shells and simulacra. We need new forms to push against.

I have a hunch that these new art forms will emerge in the cauldrons of pop-up villages and mirror their values of ephemerality and co-creation with a focus on experience. Role-playing games, performance art, and alternate reality games may be their predecessors. They will likely integrate technology and nature, progress and tradition. The novel forms might make use of the tech-bro trifecta of AI, blockchain, and VR/AR, but in service of something a more fundamental insight:

Consciousness itself is the ultimate canvas, and relationship is the primary medium

As Hanzi Freinacht argues, art prefigures broader cultural change. The Renaissance anticipated modernity through perspective. Warhol's soup cans heralded postmodernism.

Today's pop-up villages, attracting their eclectic mix of hackers, hippies, hipsters, and hermetics, might be incubating new art forms first and eventually new social norms and institutions.

Ultimately, Vibestition reminds us that surface and depth aren't opposed – they are two sides of the same coin. Like beekeepers transforming worker bees into queens through careful manipulation of form, we might transform culture through mindful curation of aesthetics. The glitter isn't just decorative – it's generative.