Earlier this year, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg held an exhibition about glitter. The museum said it was the first-ever museum exhibition dedicated to glitter. The exhibition featured several artworks specifically designed for the show, along with many everyday items loaned to the museum specifically for the exhibition. But it also featured curiously little from any museum’s collection.

The exhibition made the point that glitter, which was invented back in the 1930s, has often been overlooked as a material. Porcelain is forever, glitter is forgettable. They say: ‘Glitter is used for embellishment, yet is simultaneously regarded as cheap; it adds value while itself being undervalued.’

Glitter has a longer history than I would have thought. The word glitter was first used in English as a noun way back in 1593, and even before that it was used as a verb.

The exhibition reminded me of a number of other glittering artworks.

From a distance, this ice-cream artwork from the South London Gallery seems like the kind of thing you’d see outside an ice-cream parlour. Up close, a huge amount of glittering detail can be seen.

These large blocks of confetti are an art installation by Italian artist Lara Favaretto, seen here on display at the Museum Voorlinden, a contemporary art museum near The Hague. The colourful glitter blocks are held together by sheer force of will. Compressed together, once put in place, the confetti starts to fall apart, decaying piece by piece.

The exhibition in Hamburg made the point that glitter can stand for many things. Glitter is feminine, glitter is gay, glitter is subversive, glitter is cheap, glitter is ephemeral. Reflecting on these meanings while seeing the confetti artwork fall apart adds a new layer of meaning.

And glitter is beautiful. This artwork Five Planets is by artist Mischa Kuball. Five projectors send light to five disco balls, and it dances all around the gallery space in Museum Folkwang in Essen.

This will be the last newsletter until 2026. Have a happy festive season + see you next year. Thank you for reading + until next time,