“Fashion keeps reinventing its past, but the art world acts like shoulder pads are a crime against taste.”
Monday Bitch #8. Cringe Ages Better Than We Think
The ’80s gave fashion its reign of neon terror, a decade where shoulder pads were basically architecture and perms had their own climate systems. Funny thing is, art has had its own embarrassing eras too, even if no one’s made the blockbuster documentary yet. The cringe just hides better.
DiFranco
Fashion wears its disasters on the outside, huge and unapologetic. Art’s disasters sit in footnotes and quiet museum corners, waiting to be defended by someone with a PhD and too much caffeine. Taste has never been a universal language, and art history is really a long parade of “Awful until someone decides it’s genius.”
Take the Paris Salon with its polished paintings so stiff they could sedate a whole city. Perfect surfaces, perfect poses, perfect boredom. The establishment loved it, of course. Safe, decorative, risk-free. The aesthetic equivalent of beige carpeting.
Then you have kitsch, the art world’s guilty pleasure, that sentimental syrup you see in tourist shops and on your aunt’s wall. Sweet, cheap, mass-produced. The mullet of painting. Loved by millions, despised by the people who say “practice-based research” with a straight face.
Dominique Catherina Foertig
The real plot twist is that art never agrees on its worst moments. Someone is always out there insisting the cringe is actually radical, or historic, or misunderstood. And give it twenty years, suddenly the bad stuff becomes collectible. Fashion gets its “Neon Nightmares,” but art walks around pretending its own disasters are theory.
So keep scrolling through those shows. Beneath the jargon and the nostalgia, the cringe is alive and well. Honestly, it keeps the whole thing interesting.
👉 Cringe, but make it art. Tell me your worst art-world memory.
Heart lighter.
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Author: Dominique Foertig is the founder and editor of Catapult, The New Munchies Art Club, a Vienna-based curatorial and editorial platform for contemporary art.
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