Farhad Moshiri, the Tehran-based Iranian artist, rose to fame with his embellished, bejeweled paintings, adorned with calligraphic inscriptions of Iranian Pop culture and love poetry. I argue that Frosting Stories, one of the artist’s more recent artworks exhibited at the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh PA (2017-18), is a tongue-in-cheek commentary on violence, at once hypervisualized and camouflaged by glittering embroideries and the tactility of (imitated) cake frosting. Drawing on Krista Thompson’s formulation of bling and the use of shine as artistic strategy, I discuss Moshiri’s employment of shine as making (in)visible the relationship among pain, desire and consumption. Like many other Iranian artists, Moshiri often uses Persian script to place his artworks in a symbolic context of national identity, such as the Jar Series where the artist adorned patinated, albeit flattened representations of antique jars with verses of Pop poetry. Frosting Stories however, takes a different approach to writing. The script is far from refined in a way that it adamantly emphasizes its distance from calligraphic craftsmanship. Its rawness, achieved through constant change in size and flow of the letters, the irregular movement across lines and lack of structure and spacing among words, are all indicative of a practice-sheet, or what is known in the history of Islamic Persian calligraphy as Siyah-Mashq. On the most immediate surface, Frosting Stories is a practice-sheet written in a raw and childish handwriting. Frosting Stories mounts its critique of consumerism at the intersection of commodity culture of 1990s in Iran, the globalized capitalism and the American culture. The artwork embraces collapse of the 1970s generation’s revolutionary hopes and the sublimity of calligraphy as ‘national art,’ turning into a fervor to consume, possess and eat. The tactility of the artwork as cake and its invitation to consume vanishes at the moment of realizing that the frosting is made of acrylic, thick white paint. Bann, Stephen. “Historical Text and Historical Object: The Poetics of the Musee De Cluny.” History and Theory17, no. 3 (1978): 251. https://doi.org/10.2307/2504739. Baxandall, Michael. Patterns of Intention: on the Historical Explanation of Pictures. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Pr., 1992. English, Darby. How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Thompson, Krista A. "The Sound of Light." The Art Bulletin, Vol. 91, No. 4 (December 2009), 2015, 482-483