In art, as in life, the messy materiality of flesh fazes me not one whit.
The climax of Lukas Moodysson’s A Hole in My Heart (2004), where Geko vomits into Tess’s open mouth? Wrote about it. Judy Chicago’s menstrual defiance, Ina Poppe’s mother’s milk cheese, Martin von Ostrowski’s spunk-strewn canvases, Marc Quinn’s sculpture cast with 10 pints of his own blood? Up my alley. Florentina Holzinger’s waste-processing, piss-wallowing Seaworld Venice at this year’s Austrian Pavilion? Love it.
Yet 20 minutes into a theatrical screening of Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama (2026), I found myself in a posture of absolute misery: knees drawn to chest, shoulders hunched, the collar of my shirt pulled up under my eyes ready to cover them entirely, tension contorting my jaw. A body’s futile attempt to disappear into a single point. The proximate cause of all this anguish? A conversation among friends.
The kids have a word for what happened here. So do the philosophers.
Cringe. It’s a new term for an old thing.
It bridges two affects: shame and sympathy. Shame is older—news to neither Eve nor Masaccio. From the root “to cover,” its mix of guilt, disgrace, and dishonor is bonded to castigation (think Andrea Büttner’s 2022–25 serigraphs of public humiliation), the vulnerability of nakedness (formalized in the extreme angle of Jenny Saville’s 1993 Plan), and the revelation of what ought to remain hidden (as in Tracey Emin’s 1995 Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 or Martine Syms’s diaristic 2020 photobook, Shame Space).
In this painful experience, one is exposed (the betrayal that is blushing) and longs to hide oneself. Or obliterate the self—dying of shame is not always a metaphor.
Sympathy comes later, unleashed in 18th-century thought through Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Secularizing and rationalizing the Christian law of Matthew 7:12 (“Do unto others” and all that), Smith insists that the imagination of an “impartial spectator” can form a conception of the emotional experience of another by representing how we would feel “if we were” in their situation: “We conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter, as it were, into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him.” And it is not merely that we can feel with others, but that we should: Smith is writing an ethics.
Cringe is sympathetic shame. Vicarious embarrassment. Mortification by proxy.
EVERY LANGUAGE HAS has a name for this unpleasant experience. In Dutch, plaatsvervangende schaamte is substitute shame. The French gêne par procuration delegates discomfort, while the German Fremdschämen means foreign shame.Swedish has the skämskudde, a “cringe cushion” in which to bury one’s face while watching, say, a globally televised breakdancing fail. In Japanese, mite irarenai means unable to look at something (distressing, awkward, disastrous), but it’s Chinese slang for the win with gāngà’ái: embarrassment cancer.
These days, the interjection does a lot of work online as an all-purpose signifier of derogation. Policing cringe is the cruelest métier of the internet—the origin of harassment campaigns and platforming of contempt. The Four Horsemen of the digitally vulnerable—the queer, neurodivergent, economically precarious, and socially isolated—are far more likely to have their enthusiasms, efforts, and general being declared repellent or pathetic.
Upon receiving an honorary degree in 2022, Taylor Swift urged graduates to “learn to live alongside cringe.” But we all know that while a pretty white girl’s earnestness may read as adorkable authenticity, that advice is tone-deaf at best, insensitive at worst to so many.
Even in its less-noxious forms, to declare something “so cringe” is inherently censorious. “Hamilton is cringe!”flings Gen Alpha at their elders’ damp-eyed civic credulity; “Your nonsensical skibidi toilet rizz is cringe,” the millennials reply. Such generational accusations get tiresome quickly. Everyone thinks their kids’ slang is ridiculous and their parents’ politics naive.
BUT BEHIND THE epithet’s online omnipresence is a serious aesthetic affect grouped among strong sensations that act on the body—terms like disgust (dis-taste: what one wants to spit out) or horror (from the Latin horrere: bristling hair). Its flinching recoil derives from the Old English cringan: to yield or fall (as in battle), eventually suggesting crouching in fear.
While disgust claims the stomach and horror the nape, cringe assails the muscles of the face: a spectacle half-watched through half-narrowed eyes above a half-opened rictus.
Cringe’s temporality is complex. Wincing—its signature gesture—is sharp, sudden, violent. But duration turns the screw—prolonged humiliation or a slow unfolding toward future self-recrimination.
Is the cringeworthy utterly individual? Yes and no.
It is like obscenity, in that you know it when you see it—except when you don’t and find yourself repelled or turned on by something self-evidently arousing or repulsive to someone else, and feel yourself exposed in having failed to have known it when you saw it.
Cringing can therefore manifest as the abashment of not knowing (yet; possibly ever) how to read something. Most harrowing in Torbjørn Rødland’s This Is My Body (2013–15)—a luminous photograph of a girl’s head tilted upward by adult male hands whose fingers caress the edge of her mouth—is the realization that we cannot know whether we are witnessing bliss or brutality.
In Diego Marcon’s video The Parents’ Room (2021), a prosthetically masked man sings of the murders of his wife and children, then of his suicide. The video plays hopscotch with tone—at once horrific, ridiculous, and bathetically earnest. To mock or to mourn? That is the (distressing) question.
Or consider Jordan Strafer’s trilogy—Loophole (2023), Decadence (2024), and Talk Show (2026)—the last of which was shown in this year’s Whitney Biennial. It traffics in the somber content of trauma and sexual assault, yet performances are stylized beyond even the clichés of melodrama. Guiltily, we wonder: Are these testimonial figures worthy of compassion or not?
Complicating matters, one person’s cringe is another’s enjoyment. If X thinks some event will never befall them, or if they disallow any similarity to Y, then X might relish the spectacle of Y’s mortification—this is schadenfreude. If, however, I feel sympathy with Y on any grounds, then their humiliation is mine as well.
The playwright Aristophanes’ account of love was the soul’s clocking of its like in another. As goes eros, so goes shame. To cringe is to recognize.
Cringe thereby exposes a political truth: With whom do we feel we share something in common? It is an aesthetic reaction that strips bare one’s ethics of identification.
NOT ALL ART THAT discomfits is cringe. Damien Hirst’s A Thousand Years (1990) confronts viewers with its vitrine containing a severed cow’s head and maggots-cum-flies. It may turn stomachs, but it lacks the minefield of social relationality.
Although one can be ashamed of one’s former self (give the teenage poet a decade), cringe is inherently interpersonal, bound up with anxieties around social rejection. It scripts the interrogatory diagram where the collective meets the psychic: How do others regard me? As a joke? As talented? As a freak, a threat, an object of desire? A “chilled-out entertainer” of a boss? Da Ya Think I’m Sexy? Do you think I’m cool?
The Drama staged this structure in the process of fracturing. Dining with her fiancé and close friends, a woman imagines she is speaking within a shared set of social norms as they each playfully admit the “worst thing” they’ve ever done. But at her turn, it becomes clear that she has revealed the wrong sort of vulnerability. In place of the intimacy that the other revelations engender, hers marks her as different. What ensues is the complete batshit breakdown of every form of relationality in the film.
Nor is that all. The pain of cringe compounds. In my disturbance—whether witnessed by a fellow cinema patron or a reader of this essay—I am exposed a second time. In unconcealing what you find cringeworthy, cringe is secondhand shame that yields a firsthand confession.
For my body has betrayed that my personal Room 101 must be the mid-exposure realization of having miscalculated a mutual understanding.
LODGED IN THIS GAP between one’s self–image and someone else’s perception, all cringe art is, on some level, performance art.
The School of Athens for first-generation cringe therefore includes 1970s body art (Abramović and Acconci, our deputized Plato and Aristotle), the anti-comedy of Andy Kaufman, and Viennese Actionism. Its iteration in the 1980s and 1990s includes some YBAs (Sarah Lucas) and the sick aesthetics of Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley—witness the glorious banner reading pants shitter & proud p.s. jerk-off too (and i wear glasses) of Kelley’s 1987 Three Point Program/Four Eyes. Ryan Trecartin is the manic heir apparent to this trash-culture bloodline, updating it for a hyperperformative age.
In the term’s modern era, media scholars point to an influential run of “cringe comedy” in quality television in the 2000s. The aughts had the fraternity of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Da Ali G Show, The Office (UK), and Peep Show. A decade later saw the feminist rejoinder: The Comeback, Girls, Veep, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Insecure, and Fleabag.
In this golden age of cringe, that earlier art of transgression—with its tense silences, humiliations, and hostile disturbance of the performer-audience relationship—was channeled downstream. One could program the Girls Q-tip scene alongside Abramović’s Rhythm 0. And although they might not have the cultural capital of Acconci’s now-canonical Seedbed—in which he masturbated under a ramp while detailing his fantasies of the visitors walking above him—shows like Nathan for You and The Rehearsal have allowed Nathan Fielder to make a career off the same unwilled voyeurism experienced by those gallery visitors of 1972.
THE EXPRESSIVE POSSIBILITIES of cringe have been subsequently taken up by a range of artists working today. But first, an important distinction.
There is what I’ll call minor cringe—art that is about cringe but consumable with nary a wince. Minor cringe is meta-cringe, standing apart from the affect while coolly investigating it.
Major cringe, on the other hand, navigates the aesthetic affect critically and formally to induce it—viscerally exploiting its possibilities. Major cringe is endo-cringe. It is within it; totally saturated by it.
A Geschämtkunstwerk, if you will.
The distinction is piece by piece; the same artist can produce both. Christine Tien Wang’s photorealistic meme paintings in her 2022 exhibition “Fake Stupid, queen of cringe” at Galerie Nagel Draxler in Berlin were minor cringe. Taking a bird’s-eye view of the affects of network culture—shame, snark, anxiety—they were, nevertheless, affectively innocuous.
Not so with Starving Artist (2025), a canvas depicting a computer screen with multiple windows: a spreadsheet of bitcoin investments; the spine of a James Joyce novel; a meme based on the film Challengers; and an archival photograph of a victim of famine. Wang’s acrylic (re)rendering forces a reckoning with the moral stakes of algorithmic flattening. Shame is platformed. A portrait of collective responsibility for elisions between historical trauma and its ironized circulation? Major cringe.
Nor does an artist progress from one to the other; they are merely different modes. Amalia Ulman’s 2025 film Magic Farm, about an American team’s desperation to manufacture a viral trend in rural Argentina, is minor cringe for its pleasurable skewering of the attention economy. Her Instagram long-form project Excellences & Perfections, from 2014, however, was major cringe. Why? Because its documentation of an extreme makeover in the vernacular of online self-modification involved aspects that were fabricated (her staged breast augmentation) and nonfabricated (her actual extreme food restriction). Vicarious disturbance bleeds into complicity in an era when self-representation is conflated with self-branding. There is no position outside of cringe here.
ANY HUMILIATION IS a fall—the term descends from humilis, “on the ground.” Accordingly, many modern-day interlocutors of cringe are infatuated with the grotesque performative contortions required by life as a woman. Elevated ideals can only crumble.
Several of those dragomans were included in the recent exhibition “Picture Perfect” at Bozar in Brussels, which ran from March to August of this year. The show sought to expand norms of representation—a project whose sincerity all but courts the cringeworthy—with artists hell-bent on deconstructing the drive for beauty, including Orlan, Sara Cwynar, Juno Calypso, and Haley Morris-Cafiero. Their works render femininity disgustingly cute, violently expressed, and contemptuously received by others—both when it fails and when it succeeds. Ideals are nightmares that way.
Marianna Simnett’s video Blue Moon (2022) was on display: a glitching, flute-playing, Athena-like figure continuously morphing into a teal-and-tawny palette. Athena is herself an allegory about cringe—as the story goes, she abandoned and cursed her beloved flute after seeing how her cheeks puffed out while playing. That a self-image forged in the crucible of the fear of being ugly makes women amputate their talents? Sixteenth century BCE, meet 2026.
Blue Moon, 2022. Courtesy Société, Berlin
Or regard Anna Uddenberg’s sculpture Focus #2 (Pussy Padding), 2018, on display at the Boros Collection in Berlin from 2022 to 2026. It assembles acrylic nails, resin and fiberglass, vinyl film, and a barstool to construct a female body bent in half as she extends a fake-fur–covered selfie stick over plastic-vented genitalia. The work is tacky in signifiers, excruciating in implication. The materials are the point: The more strictly synthetics are enlisted to illustrate a ludicrous eroticism, the more embarrassed we are to recognize the deforming desire to be desired.
The apotheosis of this aesthetic of thirstiness is found in the paintings of Catherine Mulligan. Her solo show “Bad Girls Club” at Tara Downs in 2023 featured grotesque women seductively posed, decked out in the mien of late-millennial glam-trash McBling. The hands are a masterclass in contrast: Elongated nails resemble girlie self-care and melting flesh. Pouting lips are blow-job ready and corpse-bloated, flesh so bronzed it’s purple-gray. These half-dead bodies are so desperate for the world’s approval that their forms distort the pictorial, skewing perspective and leaching collaged text onto the sides of the frames.
Despite its bond with performance, cringe finds its medial match in such figurative painting. No accident that the likes of Lisa Yuskavage, Sasha Gordon, and Mulligan are regularly invoked in accounts of cringe-adjacent concepts like abjection, disturbance, disquiet. These painter’s painters retain a bond to recognizable forms of the real. To the extent that cringe feeds off sympathy and recognition, it blossoms where tropes, figures, and types play.
One can thus imagine a shocking or rage-inducing abstract painting—the history of iconoclasm attests to this. But it is impossible to imagine a purely abstract painting in relation to cringe except as a bland metaphor for dislike. Cringe qua cringe is tethered to the social. It is most acute where it is most iconic.
BEING THAT NETWORK culture is a constant inducement to exhibitionism, the internet is an incubator for public humiliation suo nomine. Accordingly, it has exponentially expanded the possibilities for humiliation by proxy.
Made early in this era, Elisa Giardina Papa’s need ideas!?! PLZ!! (2011) is a compilation of YouTube clips of young teenagers attempting to generate viewership for their vlogs. Addressing the camera, guileless eyes above baby-fat cheeks entreat: “Hey uhm YouTube, it’s PinkSummerCrush, uhm… I wanted to start a web show and I need ideas for it but I don’t know, like, any ideas.” Another whispers, “I don’t know what to do so give me ideas. I’m trying to get more stuff done. Please send me ideas… please.”
These implorations are issued from childish bedrooms with an innocence oblivious to innuendo: “I want to make you guys happy” pleads one; “I’ll do anything except for sticking something up my nose” says another. Some both beg for ideas and announce they have zero subscribers, importing the possibility that no one is watching at all.
No flayed martyr has anything on a teenage girl. Her exposure is total—her vulnerability pleromatic.
This is major cringe at its limit. Not merely due to sympathy for the tweens, nor from projecting some future time when the unerasable archive of this yearning might prove embarrassing.
Rather, to live under platform capitalism is to recognize the disturbing manner in which human need has been redescribed as algorithmic entanglement. Pretend you haven’t heard these phrases before and bear their weight: Please like this. I’ll do anything. Follow me.
Cringe names our ethical recognition of the stakes of emptying out these words.
FINALLY, THE TOUCHIEST question—the one that touches on taste. What about art that makes one cringe with embarrassment at its existence? For some, it’s the intentional kitsch of Neo-Pop; for others, the whole Jay-Z/Marina Abramović thing. I’ll nominate luxury-brand collaborations—the artworld’s driest thirst trap.
But can we learn something from art that makes us feel this way? Something, perhaps, about time? Historical time, that is.
Recall Nikki S. Lee’s “Projects,” made between 1997 and 2001, in which she photographed herself passing among various social groups and subcultures. Perhaps you, like I, were around for its heyday.
It is said that today’s poor taste is tomorrow’s high art. Cringe works in reverse: What was high art yesterday can seem like a lapse in taste today.
For who can look now at the darkened face and box braids of the Korean American photographer in her “Hip Hop Project” without wincing? (Cue a second grimace for that title.) Conversations around racial caricature have evolved; what was edgy feels painfully passé.
Yet we can learn from cringe, so long as we stay closer to Smith’s moral sentiments than online callout culture. For cringe instructs us in the humility of taste—of our aesthetic fashions, of how we ask aesthetics to do politics in certain moments. Cringing at a dated work of art is a reminder of the fragility of all of our judgments.
It has become fashionable lately to condemn sympathy for appropriating the misery of others. I remain convinced, however, that there is no truly good alternative. The sympathetic shame of cringe is the price of sociality. We live among others and have the extraordinary capacity to sometimes suffer as they do.
Who would want the callous world that successfully cloistered the feelings of others? Cringe may be excruciating, but post-cringe would be pure horror.