PRESENTATION: Cringe Realism

Like it or not, art is 9:16 now: an endless choir of artists competing, begging, screaming for attention on Instagram and TikTok. There is real pathos in the tension between art as a transcendental expressive practice and art as a job. It hurts and it is beautiful.

We call this tension cringe: capitulation to the point of self-abandonment. Beyond embarrassment at commercialising their work, artists lean into it, exploiting our vicarious embarrassment to collect views and farm aura. Somewhere between denial and tactical calculation, cringe means accepting one’s terms and moving forward.

This talk takes the internet’s most shameless artistic content seriously. What if it is the real avant-garde, documenting life under capitalism and the birth of generative AI? What if we read it as stiob: overidentification with one’s conditions to the point of parody? Or a post-Enlightenment gunk? Could the noble troll, the painter-slash-affiliate-marketer and the beatmaker-slash-online-course-seller be doing the destructive work through which the next artworld emerges?

In this talk, Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo, authors of Exocapitalism: Economies With Absolutely No Limits, offer a taxonomy of cringe.