Yellow Vulgarity: The Dictatorship of Surface

By Bahram Rameh

“Yellow vulgarity” isn’t a debate about taste. It’s not about choosing Mozart over a cheap pop track or the opposite. It’s a deeper cultural habit: a habit of swallowing without chewing. A world where speed replaces time, and surface replaces roots. In this slaughterhouse, content isn’t something to live with; it’s just a piece of meat hanging on the hook of attention. And attention unlike everything else these days is the only currency untouched by inflation.

Scene One: Scrolling, or The Practice of Forgetting

The most honest portrait of the modern human isn’t oil on canvas. It’s a person illuminated by the blue glow of a phone, sliding their finger across glass a mechanical, repetitive, endless gesture.

We don’t see the world anymore; we scroll through it. Images flash by faster than they can settle on the retina let alone the soul. “Yellow” is no longer a label for tabloid magazines; it’s the mood of the world. A template that has chewed through politics, art, design, and even our bedrooms.

For me, vulgarity isn’t ugliness of form. Vulgarity is the erasure of time the execution of reflection in favor of speed. We’ve forgotten that beauty is expensive. And the cost isn’t money it’s time.

Scene Two: The Attention Market & the Death of Pause

In today’s carnival of consumption, content is not the commodity your eyes are. Content is merely the bait. Something placed on the hook to catch the fish and sell it to the highest-bidding advertiser.

When attention becomes sellable, content has no choice but to scream. It must be fast, simple, and digestible fast food for the mind: satisfying in the moment, leaving you hungry an hour later. 

Static Acceleration: Platforms are designed like laboratory wheels for mice—we’re constantly running, yet we arrive nowhere. Anything requiring silence, re-reading, or slowness becomes “waste” and is algorithmically discarded. 

The Triumph of Form Over Meaning: It doesn’t matter what you say. What matters is how pretty it looks. Words are hollowed out; only the shell remains style, color, aesthetic neon that fills the eyes for five seconds and empties the mind right after.

Scene Three: Anatomy of Yellow

1. Slaughtering Depth

Yellow vulgarity begins where we try to understand the world through one headline. Narratives that promise to “change your life in 30 seconds” and succeed only in stealing those 30 seconds. Depth is sacrificed so the engagement chart can climb. We’ve become addicted to the feeling of understanding without the work of understanding.

2. The Copy-Paste Factory

For me, “yellow” means form severed from root. It’s the artist or the writer—who looks at Instagram Explore instead of their own wounds.

Authentic creation is dangerous; it carries the risk of failure. Imitation is safe. We are drowning in an ocean of safe replicas that differ only in their color filters.

3. The Pornography of Emotion

This is the darkest corner of the story: turning pain, bodies, and crisis into content.

Tears in front of a camera—not for empathy, but for views. We watch someone’s suffering, feel a momentary flash of sensitivity (just enough to soothe our conscience), and then scroll into a cooking clip or a dance routine.

Pain becomes décor. Aestheticized misery. A modern form of blood-consumption wrapped in a clean white napkin.

Scene Four: Sterile Beauty

The world is filled with “hotel beauty”: clean, minimal, flawless, and dead. Like a hotel room where everything is in perfect order—except no one has ever lived in it. No smell, no memory, no human trace.

Beauty without bruises, without history, without footprints—is not beauty. It’s a storefront.

Final Scene: Resistance Against the Fall

Authenticity is not a luxury word. It means your work carries your scent—the scent of time, thought, and lived experience.

• Time: Work that has sweat on it—not something whipped up in reaction to a morning trend.
• Precision: A surgical knife instead of a butcher’s cleaver.
• Experience: Letting the work pass through your flesh and memory—not through Lightroom presets.

Any time I’ve tried to be authentic, I’ve had to slow down. I’ve had to sacrifice visibility in favor of truth.

There’s no easy escape. But maybe the first step is a pause. One simple question before every click and every creation:

“Is this something that wants to be seen… or something that wants to take root?”