What Designers Get Wrong About Psychedelic Art
The fastest way to make something look “psychedelic” is also the fastest way to make it look like everybody else’s idea of psychedelic.
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The fastest way to make something look “psychedelic” is also the fastest way to make it look like everybody else’s idea of psychedelic.

There is a point where “psychedelic gift” becomes code for rainbow mushroom clip art. We can do better.

Before anyone asked an algorithm to hallucinate, Surrealists were teaching paper, bindings and photographs to misbehave.

“Trippy” is useful in the same way “tasty” is useful at a restaurant: not wrong, just tragically underqualified.

Remove the mushrooms, third eyes and melting faces. If the work is still psychedelic, something more interesting must be happening.

A psychedelic image is not a liquid you pour into different containers. Change the medium and you change the experience.

A museum can legitimize psychedelic art, preserve it and explain it. It can also freeze something unruly into a very polite rectangle. That…

Mushrooms are having a strange second career: not as food, medicine or psychedelics, but as one of contemporary art’s favorite ways to think…

The FDA now has final guidance written specifically for psychedelic-drug trials. That is important. It is also very easy to overstate what it…

The subject is stranger than the headline and usually less magical than the marketing. Modern psychedelic culture loves saying it is “rediscovering ancient…

“Set and setting” sounds like vintage counterculture jargon until you notice modern psychedelic trials spending extraordinary effort controlling expectations, rooms, music, support and…

Here is the useful version, without the incense-cloud certainty: Psychedelics can make ideas feel novel, connected and cosmically important. That is not the…
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