POPULAR BEAUTY

Digital Art Exhibition 

October 01 2025 - December 31 2025

Adia Elora Rothschild’s Popular Beauty series begins from the premise that beauty is not a natural given but a cultural construct. Within contemporary life, ideals of beauty are manufactured, disseminated, and enforced through systems such as media, fashion, and digital culture. This aligns with poststructuralist thought, which views beauty not as a stable essence but as a signifier—fluid, contingent, and dependent on the structures of language and representation. In Rothschild’s work, beauty is staged and exposed as performance, echoing Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity, in which social categories are not innate but enacted and sustained through repetition. Beauty here is not discovered but produced, a shifting agreement between image and audience.

Ephemerality and Power

Central to the series is the recognition that beauty is a fleeting category, defined as much by its temporality as by its form. What is considered beautiful today quickly becomes obsolete tomorrow, displaced by new styles, new icons, and new cultural desires. This temporality reveals beauty’s fragility: it cannot be fixed but exists only in circulation. Rothschild draws attention to this cycle of elevation and abandonment, underscoring how ideals of beauty function less as truths and more as tools of power. In Foucauldian terms, discourses of beauty regulate bodies by prescribing norms, disciplining difference, and creating hierarchies of value. In exposing the instability of these norms, Rothschild’s work destabilizes the authority of beauty itself.

Simulacra and Popular Culture

The Popular Beauty series also resonates with Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum: beauty in the age of mass media is no longer tied to an original but becomes self-referential, endlessly replicated, and consumed. The “popular” aspect of beauty is especially significant here, pointing to its democratization in digital culture, where images circulate rapidly and ideals are perpetuated through repetition and mimicry. Yet this very proliferation renders beauty unstable, dissolving its supposed authenticity into spectacle. Rothschild’s work both participates in and critiques this circulation, revealing how beauty functions as a currency of desire, exhausted by its own ubiquity.

Conclusion: Beauty as Site of Tension

Ultimately, Rothschild’s Popular Beauty series positions beauty as a site of theoretical tension: between illusion and exposure, desire and critique, permanence and flux. Beauty is revealed not as a timeless value but as a temporary agreement—one that structures identity, informs desire, and perpetuates exclusion while constantly unraveling under the weight of its own contradictions. By foregrounding its relativity and fleetingness, Rothschild reframes beauty not as an endpoint but as a question: what does it mean to chase, construct, and consume an ideal that cannot hold still?