The “cringe” painting in question - and yes, that’s Beck
A friend who teaches at my old high school sent me a photo recently. It was a painting I’d made when I was sixteen — still hanging in a dusty corner of the art room, apparently brought out sometimes as inspiration for students.
I remember seeing it on display a few years after graduating and wanting to disappear into the floor. Oh god, why would they put that up? I’d wanted to paint on cardboard, mixed media, the whole thing. The idea was clear in my head. In practice it didn’t really work. And there it was, on a wall, for other people to look at.
That was a little over ten years ago.
When my friend sent the photo, I laughed. You tried, I thought. And I meant it with full affection.
There’s a thing happening online right now — people calling it “millennial optimism” — a kind of cultural exhale in response to how exhausting it has become to be perceived. It’s named for an era: Juno, Holga cameras, Williamsburg, craft beer, Lyft cars with foam mustaches on the grille. The first wave of internet natives posting on MySpace and early Facebook without a second thought. Tweeting about breakfast. Existing online without the weight of the algorithm pressing down on them.
I came up in that. And even accounting for nostalgia, even knowing how hard those years were in the wake of the financial crisis — there was a levity then that I don’t think I imagined.
The fear of being cringe arrived the moment the internet stopped being somewhere we visited and became somewhere we live.
A lot of my creative life can be summarized as compulsively embarrassing myself in public. I mean that literally. Posting work online — sometimes not my best work — consistently, anxiously, then deleting it. Posting again. No likes. Rejection. Occasional small victories. Getting unfollowed. If I’m being honest, failure felt like eighty percent of it. Fail. Learn. Try again.
One of my photographer heroes followed me once. I posted something new. He unfollowed. I took it personally for longer than I should have.
A cinematographer who shot one of David Bowie’s last music videos followed me because of photographs I’d made. He commented. It meant everything.
I tell these stories not to perform humility or to dress up the hustle as wisdom. I tell them because I remember being so swayed by early social media’s version of success — the numbers, the metrics, the follows — that I let an algorithm tell me whether or not my work was worth making. I failed in public, again and again, so that sometimes I could succeed. That was the whole mechanism.
The follower count never really mattered to me. Craft did. Making good work did. The photographer friends I had who cared deeply about the metrics — the followers, the clout — most of them aren’t making photographs anymore. That says something I’ve thought about a lot.
I’m in that moment again.
Writing now, trying to pull together a voice that has been fragmented for a long time. Putting it out there. Feeling the old familiar cringe rising. Watching the painting on the wall.
You tried. With full affection. Let’s go.