The Emotional Economy of Borrowed Images
As AI systems generate and dissolve images at unprecedented speed, something unexpected is happening to the artifacts of human-made mass culture: they are becoming more precious, not less.
Anime characters, manga panels, iconic game figures — these images were never just entertainment. For millions of people they functioned as genuine psychic objects, internalized over years, carrying specific memories, comfort, and identity. They occupy real space in personal life.
Anime characters, manga panels, iconic game figures — these images were never just entertainment. For millions of people they functioned as genuine psychic objects, internalized over years, carrying specific memories, comfort, and identity. They occupy real space in personal life.
Untitled (Asuka), 2026 / acrylic on canvas / 100 x 130 cm / Gleb Baranov
The conventional art education response to appropriation has always been to extract and abstract: isolate what matters in the source, set the original aside, work only with the essence. Ernst Kris, in Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, offers a way to understand why this impulse is actually regressive — the conceptualist drive to purify and reduce an image works directly against how images function psychologically. Stripping the borrowed image down strips away precisely the emotional and psychic load that made it worth engaging with in the first place. That accumulated weight is not noise to be filtered out. It is the material.
Works like Untitled and Me and w... oh wait never mind engage with this territory directly. The borrowed image arrives already loaded — with community, history, and the specific texture of how people actually live with culture. That is not a shortcut. It is a legitimate and demanding place to work from.
Works like Untitled and Me and w... oh wait never mind engage with this territory directly. The borrowed image arrives already loaded — with community, history, and the specific texture of how people actually live with culture. That is not a shortcut. It is a legitimate and demanding place to work from.
Me and w... oh wait never mind, 2026 / mixed media on paper / 21x29cm / Mathis Duguccipourmonchat
In a world where machine vision produces infinite novel imagery on demand, what becomes rare is the opposite: images with genuine human history attached. The cultural object someone grew up with, returned to, and formed themselves around carries an authenticity that no generated image can replicate. This is why human-made mass culture is growing in emotional value precisely as AI accelerates.
Fragmentation of shared culture makes this more relevant, not less. There is no longer a universal artwork that speaks to everyone equally. Work made for a specific emotional community — people who know exactly what it means to grow up with these images — is not limited. It is precise.
Author: Gleb Baranov
Fragmentation of shared culture makes this more relevant, not less. There is no longer a universal artwork that speaks to everyone equally. Work made for a specific emotional community — people who know exactly what it means to grow up with these images — is not limited. It is precise.
Author: Gleb Baranov