Non Aesthetic Things

Submission 22,693

About

Non Aesthetic Things refers to a style of images and videos of slightly off-putting or strange content, presenting itself as the opposite of the Vaporwave Aesthetic art style. The term was popularized by the popular Twitter account @PicturesFoIder, which curates "non-aesthetic" content.

Origin

The @PicturesFoIder Twitter account has a join date of May 2014 and gained over 1.6 million followers in four years.^[1] The earliest extant post on the account is dated December 11th, 2016.^[2] However, similar accounts predate that post. For example, a page named @not_aesthetic_ made a post on December 4th, 2016 (shown below).

Spread

The @PicturesFoIder Twitter account began growing in popularity in mid-2017 through the present day. On July 3rd, 2017, the account tweeted a cake with the words "Have Day" on it, gaining over 500 retweets and 1,000 likes (shown below). As of November 2018, the account's post regularly generate thousands of retweets and likes. One of the most popular posts on the account, dated September 25th, 2018, gained over 55,000 retweets and 130,000 likes (shown below, right).

The term began spreading elsewhere as people applied it to strange content. For example, on June 29th, Imgur user erbekah^[3] posted an image dump of "non-aesthetic" pictures to the site (examples shown below). There is also a small subreddit for the content, /r/notaesthetic.^[4]