Cringe Has Gone From Slang to a Serious Aesthetic Category

By Grace Kim

Twenty minutes into a screening of Kristoffer Borgli's The Drama (2026), one ARTnews critic found himself "in a posture of absolute misery": knees to chest, collar pulled over his eyes, jaw clenched. The cause was not gore. It was a conversation among friends — and the essay that observation produced, titled "How Cringe Took Over Culture," argues that cringe has become one of the defining aesthetic affects of contemporary art.

The essay's central definition is compact: cringe is "sympathetic shame. Vicarious embarrassment. Mortification by proxy." It fuses two older feelings. Shame, with its root meaning "to cover," runs from Masaccio to Jenny Saville's 1993 Plan and Tracey Emin's 1995 Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995. Sympathy arrives later, secularized in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759): "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."

The word itself descends from the Old English cringan, to yield or fall in battle. Where disgust claims the stomach and horror the nape, the essay notes, cringe "assails the muscles of the face."

Which artists are making what the essay calls 'major cringe'?

The essay draws a line between two modes. Minor cringe is art about cringe that you can watch without wincing. Major cringe — the essay's coinage, half-jokingly a Geschämtkunstwerk — induces the affect itself.

Examples named:

• Torbjørn Rødland, This Is My Body (2013–15): a photograph where "we cannot know whether we are witnessing bliss or brutality."
• Diego Marcon, The Parents' Room (2021): a masked man singing of murdering his family — "at once horrific, ridiculous, and bathetically earnest."
• Jordan Strafer, whose Talk Show (2026) appeared in this year's Whitney Biennial, stylizing trauma testimony "beyond even the clichés of melodrama."
• Amalia Ulman, whose 2014 Instagram project Excellences & Perfections mixed fabricated and real self-modification, leaving "no position outside of cringe." Her 2025 film Magic Farm, by contrast, is minor cringe.
• Christine Tien Wang, whose 2025 canvas Starving Artist — bitcoin spreadsheets, a Challengers meme, a famine photograph on one screen — the essay classifies as major cringe.

What does cringe reveal beyond the gallery?

The essay is blunt about the internet. "Policing cringe is the cruelest métier of the internet," it reads, noting that queer, neurodivergent, economically precarious and socially isolated people are most often declared "repellent or pathetic." It quotes Taylor Swift's 2022 commencement advice to "learn to live alongside cringe" — and calls that advice "tone-deaf at best" for those who can't afford earnestness.

Cringe also has a political edge: "To cringe is to recognize," the essay argues, and the flinch exposes "one's ethics of identification" — with whom we feel we share something in common.

The lineage runs from 1970s body art (Abramović and Acconci as "deputized Plato and Aristotle"), through Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, to 2000s cringe comedy like The Office (UK) and Peep Show, and its feminist wave a decade later: Girls, Veep, Fleabag. Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal extends what the essay calls Acconci's "unwilled voyeurism."

The sharpest case is Elisa Giardina Papa's need ideas!?! PLZ!! (2011), compiled from teenagers' vlog pleas — "I'll do anything except for sticking something up my nose." To live under platform capitalism, the essay writes, is to hear Please like this. Follow me. and recognize what has been emptied out.

The essay closes on time and taste: Nikki S. Lee's "Projects" (1997–2001), once celebrated, now prompt a wince. That reversal — "what was high art yesterday can seem like a lapse in taste today" — is the lesson. Cringe, it concludes, instructs us in the humility of taste, and "post-cringe would be pure horror."