All everyday communication is conditioned by a habit-bound relationship with words, such that few names in our routine manage to surprise us. How trivial is it to write 'fruit' on a grocery list? And to hear 'passion'—of denser and more controversial meaning—in a song? And even if we join the two, what images come to mind beyond a simple piece of produce?

The situation seems to shift, however, when we contemplate these same words on a nail polish label. I look at “Passion Fruit”. Although I grasp the logic, it feels strange to see a piece of fruit transfigured into lacquer that will be inscribed onto nails. And what of ‘passion’? Immediately, the word sheds its habitual content, and I find myself wondering if passion might resembles this pearlescent violet color. “Igniting Love”, “Pink-Ing Of You”, “Baroque But Still Shopping ” reveal an operation of names for colors and colors for names that connects us to the historical human insistence on classifying the ineffable (was not the first task of man precisely to name all things?). On the other hand, it strikes me that this same impulse may have generated nail-polish labels such as “Last Doritos of the package”, “Daily Vlog,” and “Netflix Tudum.”

A Colorama manager attempts to explain the ritual of naming colors through a balance between the demands of capitalism and the mission of accommodating existential anxieties: “the boom in creative names arises from brands’ need to differentiate themselves in a competitive market. Nail polishes are more than beauty products: they are attributes of personal expression.” I am not convinced, however, that anyone chooses a nail color with the intention of expressing their personal fondness for cheese-nacho-flavored corn chips. Therefore, unless marketing has indeed been capable of re-substantializing the verb and thereby reestablishing an intimate connection between a name, a specific shade of orange, and the sensation of staring at the last chip in a bag, we are simply dealing with a generous commercial agreement.

But there exists yet a third lineage of names. “Bee or not to be”, “Teal The Cows Come Home”, “A Good Man-Darin is Hard to Find” are neither direct examples of the search to decipher the order of things nor the fulfillment of a tied propaganda strategy. Rather, they are titles that seek to stimulate consumption through the analogy between a color and a popular, shared cultural product. It seems to me that this third case is exemplified by Dior’s 1977 advertisement:

There it is: yet another nail-polish (and lipstick) color. Dior believed it a good marketing strategy to employ the name and work of a writerr who, though canonical, is seldom read and frequently described as difficult to enjoy (or, according to a BBC article, “the world’s most difficult novel”). Not being the product of a commercial agreement, the marketer’s faith in the market potential of À la recherche du temps perdu reveals its prominence within the cultural milieu of a certain elite that, at least in 1977, still valued pretending to be erudite.

The commercial use of Proust, however, has not been restricted to luxury goods. Monty Python skits, travel guides, cookbooks, and self-help manuals attest to a Proustomania that spread from the mid-20th century onward. It is this Proust—transformed into a consumer commodity in contemporary culture—that Margaret Gray analyzes in the final chapter of her 1992 Postmodern Proust. Her argument is that the relationship of the “postmodern subject” with the novelist is grounded in reducing him to an object of consumption, governed almost exclusively by the logics of kitschification and fetishization of the work. Such a process, Gray argues, ends up erasing the autonomy of Proustian creation, leaving only an “idolatry of the signifier” and a work emptied of its original power, its aura.

By framing kitsch as an aesthetic inadequacy in relation to the original work, Gray revisits The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, a text in which Walter Benjamin argues that a modern mode of perception—guided by an immoderate mechanism of resemblance—results in the loss of aura of artistic objects. That is, this mode of perception, by incessantly seeking to approximate the work of art through copies and reproductions, renders the spectator incapable of establishing the distance necessary to recognize the singularities of what they consume. For Gray, this makes us oblivious to the original cultural intentions and purposes of the work, substituting contemplation with familiarity and meaning with fetishized repetition.

Yet it does not seem incorrect to assert that the very possibility of criticizing a form of consumption grounded in the kitschification and fetishization of objects depends upon a fetish: the belief that there exists an innate meaning anchored in some original cultural intention. This is Jorge Coli’s diagnosis of Benjamin’s notion of aura, which he characterizes as a “fetishistic mysticism” of “strongly romantic” origin.

After listing explorers of the “third bank of the river, where the invisible and immaterial allow the similar to merge with the similar, where analogy metamorphoses into fusion”—such as Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne, whose very existence depends on the use of reproductions of originals — Coli identifies in Proust the figure who best expressed a position contradicting Benjamin’s notion of aura. To illustrate this opposition, Coli turns to the second volume of the Recherche, when the narrator finally manages to fulfill his unquenchable desire to visit the church of Balbec and stand before the Virgin on its portal, whom he had until then only contemplated through photographs and casts. Yet upon encountering the original Virgin, he does not experience the expected sublimity. Seeing her in her original state, “now reduced to the appearance of stone itself,” “subjected to the tyranny of the Particular,” he feels only disappointment.

Contradicting Benjamin, it is the encounter with the authentic work of art that deprives it of the aura that had been constructed by its reproductions. The copy, rather than implying a necessary loss of the work’s “aesthetic autonomy,” is the very condition of possibility for aesthetic contemplation, for such contemplation is not simply anchored in a truth generated by the original. The original is not the guardian of aura but one link in the chain of resemblances that lead to the truth of the work of art—a chain that also includes its various reproductions, material or imaginary.

The clash between Gray’s Benjaminian approach and Coli’s becomes evident in the way they treat the character Swann, whose name was used in Dior’s nail polish. Early in the Recherche, we closely follow the life of Charles Swann and are introduced to his habit of recognizing figures from master painters’ portraits in the faces of those around him. This habitual analogical thinking is made explicit when Swann perceives a resemblance between Odette—his cocotte, who had until then elicited little aesthetic admiration from him—and the figure of Zipporah in Botticelli’s fresco The Trials of Moses. This operation results in Odette being endowed with a new charm and fascination, the starting point of Swann’s obsession that drives the portion of the novel devoted to him.

According to Gray’s perspective, this production of resemblance makes Swann the embodiment of a kitschman, who, instead of contemplating the real person, prefers to replace her with a narcissistic gratification. Proust, through his characters, would be demonstrating,prematurely,the logic of consumption of our contemporary world. Coli’s reading is the opposite. After all, it was only due to the superimposition Odette-Zipporah that Swann’s love and marriage became possible, since what had been perceived as a face with few admirable characteristics ended up, in Coli’s words, being “[incorporated] into the eternity of a work of art.” Contrary to the destruction of alterity through the subject’s narcissistic projection onto the object of desire, Swann demonstrates that:

Resemblances and analogies create an artistic substance greater than its material limits. Works are unique, to be sure, but they are points in a broad fabric of other works or— as in Proust’s case—of ‘reality,’ through a perception that transforms it into art. These works are not composed solely of an original. As a profound constitutive element, and not as soulless substitutes, the reproduction, the mark left in memory, all forms of representation—or rather, re-presentation—all forms of associations governed by resemblance, are part of them. Material and immaterial, the work is all of this; it is made of all of this.

If Proust is effectively and continuously constructed through his consumption and reception, it becomes impossible to sustain the idea that the kitschification of Proust constitutes a disrespect to an original meaning. He is called kitsch only because his work has been carried to the extreme of its own reception: his symbolic capital became so significant and so easily transformed into economic capital that everyone wants to possess him. Proust is a radical case—like the Mona Lisa—of what any work of art can become.

From Coli’s perspective, we may regard the kitsch reproductions of Proust—especially the Dior advertisement—differently from the idea of mere degeneration of his work. They do not signify its decay but the confirmation of its endurance. I would add that, rather than familiarity, I encountered the most radical alterity upon discovering a Proust used as a nail-polish color: it would be impossible for such an advertisement to exist today. Not only for Proust, but for any book (even though I have found polishes titled “Unforgettable Books,” “Books of Enchantment,” etc.). If, for Gray, such a name linked to a nail-polish shade represents an aggression against the original, to me it radiates aura—more intensely even than the first editions of À la recherche du temps perdu that I often encounter in libraries. This advertisement (or rather, the photograph of it) has become an enchanted object: a vestige of an irretrievable time when literature could serve as a marketing strategy; when a difficult and sublime novel could, for an instant of the last century, take part in mass culture; when there was intense desire to consume it, even if only to devour it in the name of capitalism.

Just as every soup and splash of paint thrown onto museum canvases only increases the desire to visit them, that which seems to disrespect the “canon” is precisely what produces the aura that, otherwise,if simply left untouched,would slowly dissipate. The disappearance of these instances of propagation of a work’s energy signals its very end, for the canon lasts only as long as the enchantment lasts. After all, what remains for us in the present? Corn-chip-colored nail polish? And for the future? Nail polish in “Jogo do Tigrinho”[1] color? Among the possibilities available in the current state of our culture, all I wish to see is a kitschified Proust.

[1] Refers to an online bet game, very popular in Brazil.

Dhyan Ramayana

Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

December 11, 2025 

BENJAMIN, Walter. A obra de arte na era de sua reprodutibilidade técnica (primeira versão). In: Obras escolhidas: magia e técnica, arte e política. 3. ed. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1987.

CASTRO, Mayra. ‘Lágrimas do crush’, ‘Bah, guria’ e ‘Laçada perfeita’: esmaltes têm boom criativo e nomes para atrair consumidoras. O Globo, Rio de Janeiro, 9 fev. 2025. Disponível em: https://oglobo.globo.com/economia/negocios/noticia/2025/02/09/lagrimas-do-crush-bah-guria-e-lacada-perfeita-esmaltes-tem-boom-criativo-e-nomes-para-atrair-consumidoras.ghtml. Acesso em: 13 de nov. de 2025

COLI, Jorge. Reflexões sobre a ideia de semelhança, de artista e de autor nas artes: exemplos do século XIX. 19&20, Rio de Janeiro, v. 5, n. 3, jul. 2010. Disponível em: http://www.dezenovevinte.net/ha/coli.htm. Acesso em: 18 nov. 2025.

GRAY, Margaret E. Postmodern Proust. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.

POUND, Cath. Why the world's most difficult novel is so rewarding. BBC, 14 ago. 2022. Disponível em: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220812-did-proust-write-the-greatest-novel-of-the-20th-century. Acesso em: 13 nov. 2025.

PROUST, Marcel. À sombra das moças em flor. Tradução: Rosa Freire d’Aguiar. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2022.