It’s a cold Saturday afternoon in downtown San Francisco. Despite the weather, the streets are packed with determined shoppers. I feel quite pleased with myself, having just scored a pair of jeans for 50% off, when I walk into one of those stores that only sell Christmas decorations. After a few minutes of wading through a thicket of fake trees, Santas and reindeer, I’m about to turn to leave when I see it.
Presented with unlikely dignity in a gold box is a hanging ornament in the shape of the Trevi Fountain that comes with a ‘free papal blessing’. The roughly sculpted details would be boring if the whole thing wasn’t drowned in glitter. Under the shop lights, this perfect miniature of late Baroque architecture explodes into brilliance: a beacon that promises a better future and a better life.
While it may be best known for its seasonal cameos during the holiday season, glitter shows up almost everywhere, from cosmetics to credit cards and, of course, contemporary art.
The material has a resolutely American story. Its beginnings date back to the late 1930s, when Henry Ruschmann, a German immigrant, patented a high-speed machine for cutting photographic prints, which produced small, glossy cellulose schnibbles as waste. When his employees took these discarded fragments home to use as artificial snow, glitter was born. Today, Ruschmann’s company produces every conceivable variety, from fluorescent and holographic to biodegradable, in response to growing concerns about microplastics.
In his 1979 short essay “Light in its Artistic Manifestations,” Hans Sedlmayr identifies “phototropic epochs” defined by the discovery of new luminous materials and their artistic uses: bronze, Greek marble, the golden glass mosaics of Byzantium, oil paint. It’s a shame that his study ends with mirrors in 17th-century France, because glitter certainly deserves a mention.
In addition to reflecting and refracting light, glitter flattens the surfaces it adheres to; cover a sculpture in it and the dimension dissolves into a sparkling veneer. Andy Warhol’s famous comment that to understand him you only have to look at the surface of his paintings is echoed in his use of diamond dust. Although not technically glittery, this crushed glass conveys the same message: glamor achieved cheaply and mass-produced, a symbol of 20th century American consumerism.
Perhaps relatedly, glitter is often dismissed as frivolous. As Nicole Seymour notes in her 2022 book on the subject, it is “typically associated with marginalized identities and subject positions, including children, girls, women, feminine people, drag performers, queer people, transgender people, and people of color—categories that, of course, overlap in various ways.”
The association with queer culture originated in the 1950s with drag performances and continues today in the form of costumes, makeup, and appearances in highly popular TV shows such as RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–present).
In visual art, glitter is used to make the presence of such marginalized identities impossible to miss. In the work of Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, glitter transforms everyday materials such as cardboard and plastic into richly textured surfaces that evoke spiritual transcendence, camp aesthetics and strange ornamentation, turning kitsch into devotion.
Glitter also allows marginalized racial and ethnic communities to resist imposed stereotypes. Quil Lemons’ 2017 photo series GLITTER BOY depicts young black men with their cheekbones dusted in glitter, highlighting how social expectations limit expressions of identity and behavior that fall outside hyper-masculine norms. Here, shine becomes a visual emphasis on visibility.
These layered meanings, as well as the material’s long-standing association with ‘lower’ art forms, could explain why the art market is hesitant to embrace glitter-laden artworks. A recent walk around Art Basel Miami last December confirmed this. Searching for sparkling canvases in this temple of the (mainly) American art market, I came across a 1990 multimedia painting by Lucio Muñoz, a pair of shiny tapestries by Ebony G. Patterson and Yvette Mayorga, and a colorful painting by Chris Martin. A cloth by Mickalene Thomas briefly occupied me in the booth, although the shine came from rhinestones, a material better suited to her carefully controlled compositions.
That same evening, on my way to dinner, I walked into a hotel lobby that was decorated suspiciously like a small art fair. Amid derivative pop and graffiti art, I finally found the holy grail of glitter: swarms of iridescent butterflies and questionable portraits of Hollywood actors, all gleaming under a thick layer of glitter. Give in to this Salon des Refuses I began to notice the crowd around me: blazers encrusted with cabochons, mirror dresses, miniskirts in lurex and lamé, iridescent shell tops…
Had Sedlmayr lived long enough to witness this after-hours fair, he might have revised his chronology. Light slipped from the great halls of Versailles to the margins, where it became unwieldy, synthetic and defiantly cheap. Glitter does not monumentalize light; it democratizes it. And perhaps that is what makes it so difficult for part of the contemporary art world to accept this.
