If “lost its gloss” means lost its satisfying effect then….(I switch to my two-bit Lacan impersonation)

More than just pulling the curtain back from the illusion, your realization of the mechanism seems an extension of the lack you have already foregrounded in the image itself. The words as image at first seem to become what they signify. At the point at which we recognize their letters in the image, the image deteriorates and its relationship to the words that make it prove as arbitrary as the relationship between the image and the thing. The focus shifts to lacks and gaps (to borrow some ideas from our psychoanalytic friends). In this emphasis on language as the pixel-stuff of our images, comes a redoubled sense of the gap between all the signifiers and the thing we want, and perhaps, between the thing we want and the drive that makes us want it, or what it represents.