PRESENTATION: Cringe Realism

Like it or not, art today has a 9:16 format: it's the endless whining of artistic people competing and begging for attention on Instagram and TikTok. There is something truly tragic about the tension between artistic activity understood as a transcendental practice of expression and thinking of it as work. It hurts, but it's also beautiful. This tension is what we call cringe or embarrassment: surrender to the point of self-abandonment. Artistic individuals not only grapple with the shame of commercializing their own work, but they also capture it by using our vicarious embarrassment to collect impressions and “farm the aura.” Cringe takes place somewhere between repulsion and tactical calculation: it involves accepting the terms of the game and moving on.

This conversation will take seriously the most shameless artistic content of the internet. Maybe they are the real avant-garde — documenting life in capitalism and the birth of generative AI? And if you read them as a stiob: such a far-reaching identification with the conditions in which one operates that it begins to resemble a parody? Or as a post-Enlightenment sludge? Is a noble troll, painter/affiliate marketer, and beatmaker/online course seller doing the destructive work out of which another world of art will emerge?

In this conversation, Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo, authors of the book “Exocapitalism: Economies With Absolutely No Limits”, will propose a taxonomy of cringe.