Dark Academia, Sculpture, and Whiteness

Dark Academia is a hyper-curated aesthetic subculture, whereby elements of academic study are turned into a visual display, often through images in which the objects that are seen to represent the aesthetic are digitally collaged together. As suggested by its defining adjective, Dark Academia has a colour scheme of dark and muted tones, the majority of images appearing in a Google Image search consisting of grey, brown, beige and white. Although it has existed as a subculture for many years, it has become widely popularised in 2020 and 2021, with #darkacademia accumulating roughly 778,000,000 views on TikTok and 700,000 posts on Instagram at time of writing, with these numbers only increasing. The popularity of Dark Academia is striking for its apparent democratisation of academic study, with TikTok creator Lucien K explaining in interview with the New York Times that Dark Academia is ‘a very open community, even though it’s about classics’. By employing Dresang’s Radical Change Theory, whereby the ‘three technology-influenced digital age principles’ of Interactivity, Connectivity and Access are used to examine and explain changes in social behaviour in the digital age, we can explain the subculture’s ability to popularise academic study: Dark Academia certainly embodies the first two principles by engaging its content creators on social media, and, perhaps most impactfully in an area still driven by class-based socio-economic elitism, it provides free and easily accessible resources by which to engage with academia.

Although classical antiquity is just one facet of the subculture, with the works of Shakespeare and Austen being displayed as representative of Dark Academia alongside those of Homer for example, the place of classical antiquity is striking in the subculture in regards to its visuality. Indeed, as a visual representation of classical antiquity’s place in the aesthetic, and ostensibly the culture of aestheticizing academia as a whole, white marble sculpture makes a notable appearance. Thus, whilst one may expect that Dark Academia’s place in the visual reception of Classics may be one of ‘dissembedding’ tradition, this does not appear to be the case. Indeed, even a surface level exploration into the images created under the title of Dark Academia demonstrates that the visual reception of classical antiquity is still tied to white bodies in sculpture, and within these collages there is no hint of polychromy. Furthermore, the white sculptures are often found collaged amongst the bodies of predominantly white people. Therefore, despite the fact that anyone can post on the internet, and despite the push towards the recognition of polychromy in the academic sphere, it appears that on the internet whiteness and classical antiquity are still inextricably linked. Notably, this proclivity to whiteness, as demonstrated by the abundance of white sculpture found in visual manifestations of the aesthetic, is so overt as to have already garnered negative attention on the internet.

Understanding why there is still such an entanglement of the visual reception of classical antiquity with white sculpture can potentially be explained in two ways. First is the argument whereby something of the Neoclassical obsession with white marble remains, and so the general understanding is that the visual reception of classical antiquity is still defined by white marble. Secondly, it can be argued that the whiteness of the aesthetic reflects on the whiteness of those who engage with classical antiquity in general. For as Dark Academia lives predominantly in images, I believe we can apply to it Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson’s idea of photography’s ‘double indexicality’, whereby ‘the photograph points indexically both to its referent and back to the photographer, thus mediating between the subject and the world’. For although changes are being made, Classics in many ways remains a Euro-centric discipline. Therefore, it is perhaps unsurprising that the visual reception of classical antiquity is still represented by white sculptural bodies on the internet – the images of Dark Academia reflect both the white bodies which have become symbolic in the visual reception of classical antiquity, and the predominantly white bodies of those who study it. It appears then that despite the academic push towards the visual reception of classical antiquity being represented by polychromatic sculpture and more racially diverse bodies, the pervasiveness of whiteness remains.