Post-ironic Manifesto for Aspiring Artists
By Hannah Wikforss-Green / Issue 1 / November 14, 2024
The first rule of Post-irony: to avoid definitions and clarity at all costs. Post-irony is the surefire route to avoiding moral and aesthetic responsibility for any of our expressions. This is because it keeps the audience guessing about our intentions. If presented with a statement so absurd yet entirely lacking in ironic infliction, the audience is forced to ask themselves: Can this possibly be serious? Is this meant to be satirical or sincere? How can I critique or make sense of this if I don't know the creator's intention? This allows us the playful leeway to say something utterly incoherent, bizarre, or even racist, and pass it off as art. Excellent!
As a result, it is also a tremendous tool for avoiding being cringe. We all know that sincerely writing a love poem, for instance, or utilizing irony in humor (such as millennial Minion memes) is extremely cringe. To collectively and individually shun cringe, making any intention clear - or really, making anything at all clear - is absolutely impermissible. To be crystal clear, this means any utterance or assertion must be veiled with at least two layers of irony to confuse the audience.
Fewer than two layers will make the user's intention too explicit, allowing the audience to discern whether you are being ironic (meaning the opposite of what you say) or sincere (meaning what you say). We must stay far away from clarity and definitions. In aesthetic expressions, your work must make no obvious sense whatsoever. In literature, the work must be self-referential and written from the first-person perspective.
Autofiction is of instrumental value to the post-ironic creator, as your writing can be passed off as a work of art under the guise of "fiction", but in reality, it's just a memoir where you've changed the proper nouns. In visual art, the works should reference obscure pop culture moments and must be objectively ugly or kitschy.
If you use this manifesto as a guideline when creating, you can rest assured that you will succeed in transcending garden-variety midwits. They will not understand what you are aiming at achieving, and that, in itself, is the achievement.