Borrowed Nostalgia by Georgia Stewart

It seems that everywhere, contemporary artists are visually obsessed with the past. Beyond artists revisiting historical events and political histories, we see many artists looking back to simply borrow the aesthetics of another era. We can see this in vintage tactile photography, Y2K aesthetics, retro advertisements, and vintage furniture. The interesting thing about this pattern is that many of the artists who draw from this nostalgia didn't even live through or experience the time periods they reference. How can artists and viewers feel nostalgic for something that was never theirs to remember? It's possible that the answer lies somewhere between our relationship with art, memory, desire, and imagination. 

Alex Katz, Double White Band, 2013 

Contemporary nostalgia often feels like an internet-era-specific phenomenon, but to our knowledge, it's actually always been a thing. Renaissance artists were inspired by ancient Rome, but their understanding of it came completely from an imagined version of antiquity rather than reality. This goes further as Victorians were interested in the Medieval period; in the 1980s, people loved the 1950s; in the 1990s, people were obsessed with the 1970s; and in the 2000s, people looked back on the 1980s. Artists have been attracted to idealized versions of the past for what seems like forever. It seems that nostalgia may not require any direct experience.

Raffaelo Sanzio, The School of Athens, 1509-1511 

Nostalgia is often less about historical reality and more about emotional meaning. With this kind of nostalgia, decades become more about the values and moods we attach to them. For example, many people associate the 70’s with freedom and authenticity, and the 90s with pre-Internet life. 

This aesthetic nostalgia operates through symbols rather than facts, which indicate their associated moods and values to the viewer. In this, artists work through suggestion, atmosphere, and visual language rather than literal documentation. Nostalgic works are able to function as a form of world-making just as much as historical references.

Nadia Lee Cohen, Interview Magazine – Kim Kardashian, 2022 

Contemporary aesthetic nostalgia is distinct because of the fact that we are surrounded by unlimited visual material, and this is something that artists of the past just did not have access to. Social media users can spend hours immersed in a perfectly curated representation of an earlier decade, making their understanding of these eras come primarily through images rather than lived experience. Artists now have unlimited access to representations of time periods that can be collected, repurposed, remixed, and reinterpreted.

Petra Collins, Selfie, 2013-ongoing 

Nostalgic aesthetics provide already solidified symbols, emotions, and associations. Through this, imagery from the past can be used to express modern-day desires and anxieties. The popularity of certain aesthetics may reveal dissatisfaction, uncertainty, or longing within a broader group. Perhaps what artists are actually searching for is not the past itself, but what they imagine the past represents.

Sally Mann, Triptych, 2004 

It's not uncommon to watch a movie like Grease and feel nostalgia and longing for the past, even though most current viewers can't say they ever lived through the 1950s, and even the movie's primary audience when it came out in the 1970s mostly lacked direct experience of the decade. Nostalgia is anchored in emotional associations rather than being dependent on personal memory. Artists have always built relationships with these imagined pasts, but this nostalgia rarely tells us what a historical era was actually like. Instead, it reveals more about what we long for in the present.

Nadia Lee Cohen, Sarah and Friends, 2017