What I always find most striking about this picture is the insane, obvious, over-the-top evilness of it. But then I remember that at the time there was no prior insane evilness for that kind of iconography to be associated with. It’s a design language, a trend, and just like anything else it can be popular or unpopular depending on the context. One decade baggy pants look cool, then they look stupid, then they look cool again, and so on. At the time that that first went on display, it probably didn’t seem so obviously evil.

For a long time I thought the most valuable lesson that picture can teach is that evil can always wear a new disguise, and a mere visual similarity is not enough to identify it. You have to be able to look behind the disguise and see what is really there.

But it seems that this generation of evil is not so creative.