I used to think metamodernism was just a fancy term art critics invented to sound clever at gallery openings.
Then I spent three months watching how contemporary artists actually work, and honestly, the oscillation between irony and sincerity isn’t some abstract theoretical construct—it’s the emotional whiplash you feel standing in front of a Kehinde Wiley painting where classical European portraiture meets hip-hop culture, or scrolling through Instagram where influencers post earnest mental health confessions sandwiched between sponsored content they’re clearly mocking. The philosopher Timotheus Vermeulen and cultural theorist Robin van den Akker coined the term around 2010, describing it as a structure of feeling that oscillates between modernist enthusiasm and postmodern irony, never quite settling on either pole. It’s exhausting, actually. You’re supposed to feel both moved and suspicious simultaneously, engaged and detached, believing and doubting. Artists like Petra Cortright create digital paintings that look like desktop screensavers from 2003, but they sell for tens of thousands of dollars at galleries—are we laughing at the commodification of digital kitsch or genuinely appreciating new aesthetic territory? Wait—maybe both?
The Visual Language of Simultaneous Contradictions That Somehow Work
Here’s the thing: metamodern visual expression doesn’t resolve contradictions, it performs them. Ryan Trecartin’s videos assault you with hyperactive editing, amateur-looking effects, and dialogue that sounds like Twitter arguments, yet underneath there’s this weird sincerity about identity and community. The Japanese artist Takashi Murakami plasters smiling flowers everywhere—cute, commercial, ironic commentary on consumerism—but he’s also deeply serious about bridging high art and popular culture, about reclaiming Japanese aesthetics post-World War II. I guess it makes sense that a cultural movement emerging during the 2008 financial crisis and social media explosion would refuse to pick sides.
The visual markers are pretty consistent once you start noticing them. Bright colors deployed without postmodern cynicism but also without modernist utopianism. Earnest symbolism presented through ironic formats—like how Amalia Ulman’s Instagram performance “Excellences & Perfections” (2014) documented a fake lifestyle transformation that critiqued influencer culture while genuinely exploring feminine performance and class aspiration. Nostalgia gets weaponized differently too: not the detached pastiche of postmodernism, but a sincere longing filtered through awareness that nostalgia itself is constructed. Simon Fujiwara’s “Happy Museum” project recreates childhood memories as museum installations, simultaneously mocking institutional preservation and genuinely mourning lost innocence.
Turns out the oscillation happens at multiple scales.
Within single artworks, you’ll see techniques borrowed from commercial design—gradients, stock photography, corporate aesthetics—but recontextualized with enough care that you can’t dismiss them as purely satirical. Ed Atkins creates CGI avatars that lip-sync melancholic poetry in videos that look like video game cutscenes, blurring the line between digital artifice and emotional authenticity. Across an artist’s career, the swinging becomes even more pronounced. Cory Arcangel started making deliberately glitchy, ironic works like “Super Mario Clouds” (2002), then gradually shifted toward more earnest explorations of digital labor and obsolescence, though never abandoning the humor entirely. The philosopher Alison Gibbons argues that metamodernism’s visual strategies create what she calls “affordances for empathy”—the ironic framing gives viewers permission to feel sincerely without embarassment, while the sincere content prevents the irony from collapsing into nihilism. I’ve seen this play out in museums where people laugh nervously at Jon Rafman’s internet detritus collages before going quiet, realizing they’re looking at genuine loneliness and alienation.
Why Contemporary Audiences Seem Wired to Recieve Contradictory Messages
Maybe we’re just exhausted from choosing sides.
The generation that grew up with simultaneous access to ironic meme culture and activism hashtags, where you could watch a climate disaster unfold in one browser tab while shopping for fast fashion in another, doesn’t experience sincerity and irony as opposites—they’re just different frequencies in the same signal. Visual artists working now understand this implicitly. Alexandra Gorczynski’s “Flower Paintings” series uses the most earnest subject imaginable—still life florals—but renders them through multiple Instagram filters and digital manipulations, so you’re looking at sincerity that’s been processed through layers of technological irony. The color palettes alone tell the story: not the muted tones of postmodern irony, not the bold primaries of modernist conviction, but the oversaturated, slightly artificial hues of smartphone screens and digital sunsets. There’s something almost desperate about it, this refusal to commit fully to either stance. Anyway, artists like Arvida Byström photograph themselves in pastel bedrooms surrounded by cute objects, addressing serious themes like body autonomy and online harassment, and viewers seem totally comfortable holding both readings simultaneously—this is adorable, this is disturbing, this is commentary, this is sincere self-expression.
The critic Luke Turner’s “Metamodernist Manifesto” (2011) proposed that oscillation itself generates meaning, that the movement between poles creates energy that static positions can’t access. In visual terms, this means images that refuse to let you settle into comfortable interpretation, that keep shifting between registers. It’s uncomfortable, honestly. But it might be the only aesthetic strategy that accurately reflects how it feels to be alive right now—somewhere between hope and cynicism, sincerity and performance, believing everything and nothing all at once.
