Is this ring Gothic?
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Check back tomorrow for my own interpretation.
3 thoughts on ““Is This Gothic?” #6”
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Is this ring Gothic?
Post your opinion as a comment!
Check back tomorrow for my own interpretation.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
For that matter, are the mannequin hand, the ‘Glamour’ font, and the ~20 degree offset Gothic?
If I err, it is by way of ignorance, not malice. But it seems to me that a large part of gothic is occultation. The portrait behind the veil, the secret passage, the miniature inside a locket. That’s inside the locket. Though the ornate metalwork and the faded visage of a pale woman lead down a gothic road, I’d say it misses the turn.
My answer, would be “yes” but “who cares”? That is, it fills enough of the traditional criteria of a variety of different Gothicisms that it’s hard for me to say that this object doesn’t conjure the “Gothic.” But that’s it… it doesn’t engage in any sort of really meaningful way, or I don’t think it engages in any way that isn’t bullshit. Sometimes kitsch is just kitsch.
Nemo, I think your point about occultation is extremely prescient. Literal, metaphoric, or more fully abstracted occultation is the result and reason for many of the traditional tropes of the Gothic (secret passages and hidden bloodlines) and of course they have persisted into more recent interpretations. And of course, that’s where the Gothic starts to get interesting. As you observed, there isn’t any occultation here, to the point where the locket, rather than securing the cherished image, broadcasts it.
In my mind, it doesn’t miss the turn to Gothicville so much as it leads to a horribly boring suburb.