On 3 January, news broke that Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, had been captured by US Delta Force commandos in their Caracas compound and flown to the US to face narco-terrorism charges. As the story spread across news feeds, one image that quickly came to stand in for the event itself showed Maduro as he was led into the offices of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Wearing white socks and black slides, a hoodie and a grey beanie perched atop his head, he is flanked by two DEA agents in branded jackets, his cuffed hands clutching a plastic water bottle.

The image is humbling by design. This perp walk is, ultimately, a walk of shame. Maduro, Venezuela’s strongman president, appears tired and thirsty – a frumpy guy in a lopsided hat and leisurewear. As with so many images of fallen authority, the scene carries a familiar visual charge. The mind moves easily to other images of carceral shame: Jeffrey Epstein’s bedraggled mugshot; a courtroom sketch of a grey-haired, tired Sean Combs; or Saddam Hussein, bearded and dishevelled after being pulled from his spider hole. Power, briefly, is reduced to a body.

Artists have long understood that mass imagery – visual culture produced and circulated at scale for wide public consumption – does not simply document power; it trains the eye to hunger for its downfall. It is that cultivated hunger that makes the perp walk feel like a verdict given before the subject has even entered the courtroom. As over-referenced as it may be, Andy Warhol captured this with particular clarity in his ‘Death and Disaster’ series (1962–64). Working with press images of public executions and fatal accidents, Warhol recognized that the modern visual machine does not simply inform; it feeds an appetite. Repetition of the media machine does not dull attention so much as prime one to receive, producing a gaze that is at once numb and hungry. What Warhol reveals is how repetition converts looking into a reflex, preparing images to function less as information than as a form of judgement delivered without pause or process.

If Warhol sensed in the mid-20th century that the circulation of images would cultivate an insatiable visual appetite for violence (and shame), the present moment only confirms it. As news of Maduro’s indictment spreads globally, so too does his image, now subjected to a corresponding process of consumption. The photograph stages a visual show trial in which the global eye acts as judge and jury, consuming the spectacle of power reduced to a denuded body. While consequences continue to follow legal resolution; in today’s visual economy, looking increasingly runs parallel to it.  

With the growth of the culture industries, artists like Warhol quickly noticed that shock images were equally part of pop culture. When Cady Noland created Oozewald in 1989, she extended and hardened the awareness Warhol had already named. The work presents a flat aluminium cut-out, punctured with holes and silkscreened with the photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald at the moment he was fatally shot during his own perp walk in 1963. Noland’s sculpture strips the image of narrative and resolution, turning violence into surface and spectacle into object. Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 (1988) cycle of atmospheric black and white paintings operates in a similar vein, transforming press photos and archival images relating to members of West Germany’s Red Army Faction – including their arrests, dead bodies and funeral – into works that speak to the psychic imprint images like these leave in our collective memory. In both Noland and Richter, the image no longer asks to be interpreted or weighed; it presents itself as a closed event, offering the sensation of consequence without the burden of understanding or deliberation.

As the circulation of images began to take on increased velocity through their dissemination on digital platforms, artists also began to reference the growing hunger for and evolution of images of shock and humiliation. In Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016), Arthur Jafa constructs a web of mediated desire around the Black body. The video moves relentlessly between images of elation and brutality, pleasure and terror, generating its affective force through rhythm and repetition rather than narrative. The title itself signals a closed circuit, one in which images circulate endlessly, feeding a hunger that never resolves into understanding. By moving rapidly between footage of celebration and violence, Jafa reveals not only how bodies are turned into images, but how the pace of desire and consumption informs contemporary visual culture. 

Visual schadenfreude has only accelerated with the growth of AI tools and fits in seamlessly with the needs of the Trump administration to generate visual indictments on demand. In a widely reported case this January, an image released by the White House following the arrest of Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Black woman protesting ICE in St Paul, Minnesota, was found to have been digitally altered. The original photograph shows Armstrong stoic and composed as she is escorted, handcuffed, by a law enforcement officer. As well as having darkened her skin tone, the doctored version recast her as visibly crying, shifting the image from one of resistance to one of emotional collapse. What this episode reveals is not simply the use of a new technology but the intensification of visual punishment, whereby humiliation and racialized shame are engineered for circulation rather than captured as fact. 

The arrest of Maduro was itself an act of humiliation. The imagery that accompanied it functioned to make visible that fall, and the courtroom of the eye completes this work. Watching Maduro as he clings to that bottle of water, you can see it: a powerful man reduced to a humble body that needs. Humiliation is what the image delivers, and what the audience consumes. The act of looking becomes a surrogate for accountability, operating in an extrajudicial territory where consequence is felt rather than determined. The verdict arrives not through law but through repetition, circulation and the shared sensation of having seen.