The Year in Digital Folk Art

Kissick’s Spike article “The Vulgar Image” garnered less attention than his controversial late 2024 Harper’s screed, “The Painted Protest,” but was more perceptive about the state of contemporary culture. The article enumerates the aesthetic qualities of what he calls the “Vulgar Image”: “figurative, tasteless, illegible, stupid, fake, disembodied, grotesque, transformed.” Such images, which encompass things like Wojaks, mutant ape NFTs, and memes of JD Vance’s bloated head, circulate widely online because “bad taste is a way of standing out when there are too many images.” You don’t have to share Kissick’s neo-Romantic belief that edginess can re-enchant a staid world to grasp that he has put his finger on a major 2020s cultural tendency.

Vulgar Images were so pervasive in 2025 that even the sitting US President was posting them. In February, Donald Trump’s Instagram account reposted an outlandish AI-generated video—whose creator, filmmaker Solo Avital, claims was intended as satire—that asked “What’s next?” for Gaza. The video depicts the war-ravaged Palestinian territory transformed into a bustling vacation destination with a tacky casino aesthetic, set to a catchy synth-pop tune praising “Trump Gaza/ shining bright.” Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sip beers poolside at a luxury hotel; Elon Musk dances as dollar bills rain down like he’s in a 90s hip-hop video. “Trump Gaza” wasn’t the President’s only off-color post this year—see, for example, his literal shitpost in response to October’s No Kings protests—but its cavalier vision of genocide’s aftermath was one of the most disturbing, even by his standards.

Walker’s brilliant Substack, YouTube, and TikTok accounts interpret meme culture with the enthusiasm of a Cultural Studies professor but none of the pretension. His commentaries often view online artifacts through a Structuralist lens, from formalist comparisons between sonnets and vertical videos to an analysis of how Skibidi toilet videos play with point of view. His “Exploring the Lore of Lakaka” video is part of his series on international brainrot. The video makes the case that @lakaka’s TikTok lore videos composed of cat photographs constitute “the emergence of a new literary genre that could only exist on a platform like this”: one that entails “world building in a spatial way rather than through time,” with an “awareness of audience response baked into the content.” Walker’s illuminating analyses lay bare the formal innovations of meme culture, which excede mere vulgarity.

Unlike many content creators, Myers has a fine arts background; however, much like many content creators, her output isn’t oriented toward traditional art contexts. “posting harmony,” a series of 100 NFTs, consists of short motivational texts, each beginning with the word “post,” overlaid on spare images of foods or consumer goods. “post without expectation,” reads no. 82, across an image of an orderly row of travel toiletries, half of them mysteriously wrapped in brown paper packaging. “post until it’s done,” advises no. 67, above an opaque plastic storage container whose lumpy beige contents aren’t identifiable. The Minimalist series has a self-help bent, offering “guidelines to digital sincerity” so as to relieve “posting anxiety.” Yet its koan-like texts and shrouded objects cultivate a reticent mood. The beguiling simplicity of Myers’ Instagram tagline— “i do it for no reason”—manages to be self-aware about not being self-aware, at once embodying posting’s folk authenticity and softly questioning its possibility.

Unlike many content creators, Myers has a fine arts background; however, much like many content creators, her output isn’t oriented toward traditional art contexts. “posting harmony,” a series of 100 NFTs, consists of short motivational texts, each beginning with the word “post,” overlaid on spare images of foods or consumer goods. “post without expectation,” reads no. 82, across an image of an orderly row of travel toiletries, half of them mysteriously wrapped in brown paper packaging. “post until it’s done,” advises no. 67, above an opaque plastic storage container whose lumpy beige contents aren’t identifiable. The Minimalist series has a self-help bent, offering “guidelines to digital sincerity” so as to relieve “posting anxiety.” Yet its koan-like texts and shrouded objects cultivate a reticent mood. The beguiling simplicity of Myers’ Instagram tagline— “i do it for no reason”—manages to be self-aware about not being self-aware, at once embodying posting’s folk authenticity and softly questioning its possibility.

The quasi-anthropological A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City, on the other hand, plays up posting’s inherent artifice. Part of the Whitney Museum’s “On the Hour” web series, each thirty-second-long clip excerpts text from “day in my life” TikTok videos found online, rendered as large bubbly pink font. Excerpts from those videos’ comments section pop up in the background: “I grab some snacks because it gets boring,” announces one clip, “and I head back upstairs to do some work at 2:00.” In response to this prosaic status update, commenters gush things like, “living the dream ♥️♥️♥️,” or “the fit is also unreal,” alongside the occasional dig: “White girls are obsessed with coffee because they think it’s cool.” In abstracting linguistic content from a visual medium, Man presents a funhouse vision of TikTok vernacular’s over-the-top banality.

Like Man’s art practice, Seu’s A Sexual History of the Internet is oriented toward fine art audiences, though it draws from and historicizes digital culture. The project exists in two forms: as a live performance lecture in which the audience’s synchronized phones function as part of the performance, and as an artist’s book documenting the performance transcript. The piece likens smartphones to “teledildonics,” a concept borrowed from cyberfeminist philosopher Sadie Plant, and remains attuned to the haptics of computer technologies—as when Seu quotes Douglas Engelbart describing his invention of the computer mouse as “a new way to think.” The book has the kind of innovative royalty structure that its publisher, Metalabel, has become known for: everybody cited in the book can opt-in to receive a share of its royalties. But the project’s fullest realization is as a live performance, even if Seu’s concluding claim that she has dommed the audience by making them follow her rules feels more cute than profound.

More than a decade ago, in his essay “The Accidental Audience,” Troemel asked what happens when online-oriented artists “stop making art for the idealized art world audience they want and start embracing the new audience they have?” His Contemporary Art Report culminates his latest work in this direction. The hour-long video essay surveys artistic trends from the past decade, such as the closure of mid-sized galleries, then presents fabricated AI-generated examples of those trends as though they were factual, among them a fictional gallery whose business plan is to collect insurance payouts from natural disasters. Some critics view the work as a clever intervention into our post-truth image environment, while others, myself included, view it as post-identity grievance masquerading as institutional critique. But everybody agrees that Troemel loves to play the role of the heel, and that his polarizing folk art practice trades on its opposition to the trad art system.

The NFT art world also exists at a remove from the traditional art world, and few critics have moved between both worlds as adeptly as former Art in America staffer Brian Droitcour. His 2022 article, “From Dark Matter,” recently reprinted in Do Not Research, explains how and why crypto art came to operate separately from most fine art contexts, and his involvement with Outland, relaunched this year as a publishing and educational nonprofit dedicated to art and technology, has the much-needed capability to facilitate understanding of digital art across all worlds. Droitcour’s excellent two-part newsletter, “Two Trends in NFT Art,” contains deep dives into the genres of blockchain formalism, concerned with the structures of attention that algorithms produce, and of schizocollage, maximalist digital collages whose contents derive from esoteric, sometimes vulgar, digital networks. These and other of his texts set the terms for discussions about today’s digital art.

Asparouhova’s cult hit book, Antimemetics, may not be a work of art in its own right, nor even a work of criticism about digital art. But it does help explain why digital folk art circulates memetically on the Internet, yet antimemetically in fine art contexts. She defines antimemes as “ideas that resist being remembered, comprehended, or engaged with, despite their significance,” such as taboos, open secrets, and whisper networks.

Part of the reason why the traditional art world hasn’t quite known how to engage with digital folk art stems from cultural economics: whereas art market prices derive from a work’s scarcity, professional content creators make money from their work’s promiscuity. The existence of anonymous, amateur, and collective creators, complicates things further, as does AI. As more creatives who straddle the folk and fine art worlds explore alternative ways to monetize their practices—on platforms such as OpenSea, Patreon, and Metalabel—it’s not a stretch to imagine that one day we might look back at the early 2020s as a moment when the economics, aesthetics, and reception of visual art began to undergo paradigm shifts that were only half-perceptible at the time.