Why are goldfish beautiful, yet unsettling?
Why do goldfish so often make us uneasy?
They are undeniably beautiful, yet their beauty can feel manufactured.
They live inside transparent containers, as if they are allowed to exist, and also permanently watched.
In this issue, we use the goldfish as a way to ask a few questions:
What kinds of meaning have humans projected onto goldfish?
Why do they so often carry a dreamlike, specimen-like, even corpse-like feeling?
When a living being is placed for so long inside systems of aesthetics, decoration, and gaze, is it still simply a “fish”?
We approach these questions through visual psychology, relations of looking, anthropomorphic projection, pathological aesthetics, and spatial distortion, taking apart an everyday image that is rarely examined this closely.
What you may be seeing is not only a goldfish, but a beautified model of control.
It may also be ourselves.
If you also recognize that feeling of something being beautiful and uncomfortable at the same time,
we invite you to explore this issue and share in the comments:
When was the first time a goldfish felt strange to you?
