New sincerity
Based on Wikipedia: New sincerity
What if the most radical thing an artist could do today was simply mean it?
That question sits at the heart of a cultural movement that emerged in the 1980s and continues to reshape how we create and consume art. It's called the new sincerity, and understanding it requires first understanding what it rebelled against.
The Weight of Irony
By the late twentieth century, irony had become the default mode of sophisticated expression. Postmodernism—that sprawling intellectual movement that questioned grand narratives, embraced pastiche, and delighted in pulling back the curtain to reveal the machinery of culture—had trained audiences to distrust earnestness. To care about something openly was to be naive. To believe in anything wholeheartedly was to miss the joke.
This wasn't arbitrary cruelty. Postmodern irony emerged from genuine skepticism toward the ideologies that had produced world wars, colonialism, and consumer manipulation. If you couldn't trust the big stories society told about itself, you could at least demonstrate your sophistication by refusing to be fooled. You could wink at the audience. You could put quotation marks around your feelings.
But something strange happened. The protective armor of irony became a prison. If every statement is hedged with knowing detachment, genuine communication becomes impossible. If every emotion is performed in air quotes, human connection atrophies. The cultural critic David Foster Wallace, who would become the new sincerity's most influential theorist, diagnosed the problem with characteristic precision: irony had become "the song of a prisoner who's come to love his cage."
The Accidental Birth of a Movement
The phrase "new sincerity" first appeared in an unlikely place: the Austin, Texas music scene of the mid-1980s.
It started as an insult.
Jesse Sublett, an Austin punk rock musician and author, made an offhand comment to music writer Margaret Moser about a crop of local bands that seemed to reject the sneering cynicism of punk and new wave. According to later accounts, Sublett said something like "All those new sincerity bands, they're crap." Sublett himself insists he was misquoted—that what he actually said was "It's all new sincerity to me... It's not my cup of tea."
Either way, Moser seized on the phrase and began using it in print. The term stuck. Suddenly there was a name for bands like the Reivers, True Believers, Wild Seeds, Glass Eye, and Doctors Mob—groups that traded punk's nihilistic pose for something more vulnerable and emotionally direct.
The most acclaimed figure to emerge from this scene was Daniel Johnston, an eccentric songwriter whose lo-fi recordings captured a raw, almost painfully exposed emotional sincerity. Johnston, who struggled with bipolar disorder throughout his life, created music that seemed to bypass the usual defensive mechanisms of artistic presentation entirely. His songs sounded like someone had accidentally broadcast their inner monologue.
None of these bands achieved significant commercial success. Despite coverage in Rolling Stone and an MTV documentary, the Austin new sincerity scene faded within a few years. But the idea had been planted.
Wallace's Manifesto
In 1993, David Foster Wallace published an essay that would become the movement's defining document. "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" began as a critique of television's influence on American literature but built toward something more ambitious: a vision of what might come next.
Wallace argued that television had absorbed and neutralized irony. The commercials were ironic. The sitcoms were ironic. Even criticism of television was ironic. Irony, which had once been a tool for puncturing official hypocrisy, had become the official mode of a consumer culture that could seamlessly incorporate any form of resistance.
What would genuine rebellion look like in this context? Wallace's answer was startling:
The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of "anti-rebels," born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall to actually endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction.
These new rebels, Wallace predicted, would face ridicule. They would be called naive, sentimental, outdated, quaint. That would be precisely the point. The postmodern ironists had risked shock and outrage. The new sincerity rebels would risk something more terrifying in a cool-obsessed culture: the yawn, the rolled eyes, the accusation of being uncool.
Wallace practiced what he preached. His massive 1996 novel Infinite Jest attempted to embody this anti-ironic stance while still engaging with the full complexity of contemporary life. The book didn't pretend that media saturation and consumer capitalism weren't real. But it insisted that genuine emotion, genuine connection, genuine meaning were still possible—and still mattered.
The September 11 Inflection Point
Cultural movements rarely have clean origin stories, but sometimes history provides a sharp dividing line.
On September 11, 2001, something shifted in American culture. The attacks themselves were impossible to process through ironic distance. The images were too overwhelming, the grief too raw. Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, wrote an editorial declaring that the attacks had ended "the age of irony."
Carter's obituary proved premature—irony is not so easily killed—but he had identified a genuine change in cultural mood. The 1990s suddenly seemed like a distant country, a place where people had the luxury of treating everything as a joke because nothing really seemed to matter. The new century announced itself with death and fire and collective trauma.
In this context, the new sincerity's insistence on emotional directness no longer seemed quite so naive. Perhaps there were things worth taking seriously. Perhaps defensive detachment was itself a kind of cowardice.
The Movement Spreads
After September 11, critics began identifying new sincerity tendencies across multiple art forms.
In music, a new generation of performers embraced emotional vulnerability without ironic hedging. Sufjan Stevens created baroque pop albums that took both Christian spirituality and Midwestern geography seriously. Arcade Fire built anthemic rock songs around genuine fear, genuine hope, genuine apocalyptic urgency. Conor Oberst, performing as Bright Eyes, sang with a trembling sincerity that would have seemed embarrassing in the grunge era.
In literature, authors like Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers, and Marilynne Robinson wrote fiction that engaged with big questions—family, faith, mortality, love—without postmodern evasion. These novels didn't pretend the twentieth century's insights about narrative construction and linguistic instability hadn't happened. But they refused to let those insights prevent them from telling stories that mattered emotionally.
In film, critic Jim Collins had already identified a "new sincerity" strand in early 1990s movies like Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves, and Hook—films that treated genre conventions with earnest respect rather than knowing pastiche. This tendency accelerated in the 2000s and 2010s, culminating in works that wore their hearts on their sleeves without apology.
From David Brent to Ted Lasso
Perhaps nowhere has the cultural shift been more visible than in television comedy.
In 2001, Ricky Gervais created The Office, a British sitcom built on "cringe comedy"—humor derived from watching its characters make disastrously wrong social choices. The show maintained strict ironic distance from its protagonist, David Brent, a deluded middle manager whose every attempt at connection backfired catastrophically. The audience was positioned to laugh at him, never with him.
This approach dominated the next decade of prestige comedy. Arrested Development, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Curb Your Enthusiasm—show after show built around protagonists we were meant to view with amused contempt. The mode required sophisticated viewers who could appreciate the gap between what characters believed about themselves and what the show "really" thought.
Then something changed.
By 2020, the hit comedy Ted Lasso embodied a radically different approach. Its protagonist was a genuinely good person trying to help others. The show asked audiences to root for him sincerely, to feel genuine warmth toward characters who supported each other. The ironic distance had collapsed entirely.
New York Times television critic James Poniewozik traced this shift in a widely discussed 2021 essay. He argued that the change reflected both audience exhaustion with nihilistic detachment and the entrance of new voices into television—creators from communities that had never had centuries of being depicted as heroes, and thus had less interest in skewering their protagonists.
The Russian Parallel
Remarkably, a parallel movement emerged in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, using the same name but developing independently.
In the mid-1980s, dissident poet Dmitry Prigov and critic Mikhail Epstein began using the term "novaya iskrennost" (new sincerity) to describe a response to the absurdity that pervaded Soviet culture. After decades of official ideology so transparently hollow that everyone understood it to be meaningless, ironic detachment had become the only sane response. Everything was a joke because nothing could be taken at face value.
The Russian new sincerity proposed an escape from this trap. As Epstein wrote, it attempted to "resuscitate 'fallen', dead languages with a renewed pathos of love, sentimentality and enthusiasm." But crucially, the Russian version didn't require abandoning irony altogether. Alexei Yurchak of the University of California, Berkeley described it as "a particular brand of irony, which is sympathetic and warm, and allows its authors to remain committed to the ideals that they discuss, while also being somewhat ironic about this commitment."
This is a subtle but important distinction. The new sincerity doesn't necessarily mean becoming naive or pretending that irony never happened. It can mean holding sincerity and irony simultaneously—caring about something while also maintaining awareness of the absurdity of caring, and choosing to care anyway.
Maximum Fun and the Brony Paradox
In 2002, a college student named Jesse Thorn started a radio show that would eventually become the public radio program Bullseye. He also began promoting what he called "new sincerity" as a social philosophy.
Thorn's version was more playful than Wallace's literary manifesto. Its tenets included "maximum fun" and "be more awesome." It celebrated joy without embarrassment and rejected the then-dominant hipster stance of enjoying things only ironically—liking bad movies because they were bad, appreciating kitsch for its camp value rather than any genuine pleasure.
Looking back in 2009, Thorn admitted the project had started as "a silly, philosophical movement that me and some friends made up in college." But he added something illuminating: "everything that we said was a joke, but at the same time it wasn't all a joke in the sense that we weren't being arch or we weren't being campy. While we were talking about ridiculous, funny things we were sincere about them."
This captures something essential about how new sincerity functions in practice. It's not about humorlessness. It's about being sincere about the things you find funny, caring genuinely about the things you enjoy, even when those things might seem silly or embarrassing by the standards of cool.
Perhaps no phenomenon illustrated this better than the bronies—the largely adult, predominantly male fanbase that emerged around the 2010 animated series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Here was a show created by Hasbro to sell toys to young girls, embraced without ironic distance by grown men who found genuine joy in its themes of friendship and its colorful aesthetic.
The bronies were described as "internet neo-sincerity at its best." They challenged the expectation that adults, especially men, should only engage with such content through protective layers of irony. They liked what they liked, and they weren't ashamed of it.
Poetry's Quiet Revolution
Since 2005, a community of poets has developed a distinctly new sincerity approach to verse, often organizing and publishing through blogs and small presses.
Poet Joseph Massey described it as "a 'new sincerity' brewing in American poetry—a contrast to the cold, irony-laden poetry dominating the journals and magazines and new books of poetry." Other poets associated with this sensibility include David Berman, Catherine Wagner, Miranda July, Tao Lin, and many others.
The poetry world, with its smaller audience and less commercial pressure, provided a space for experimentation with emotional directness that might have seemed too risky in more prominent art forms. These poets could be earnest without fear of mass ridicule, creating work that prioritized genuine connection over sophisticated detachment.
What New Sincerity Is Not
Understanding a concept sometimes requires understanding what it opposes and what it differs from.
New sincerity is not the same as being unsophisticated or pretending that postmodernism never happened. The new sincere artist has typically passed through ironic detachment and come out the other side. They're not naive about the problems postmodernism identified—the instability of meaning, the constructedness of narrative, the way power operates through discourse. They've simply decided that these insights don't prevent genuine emotional engagement.
New sincerity is not the same as sentimentality, though it risks being called sentimental. Sentimentality manipulates emotion through cheap tricks; new sincerity attempts to earn emotion through honest engagement. The distinction is subtle but crucial.
New sincerity is not the same as earnestness about everything. Many new sincerity practitioners maintain ironic distance about some subjects while being sincere about others. The Russian formulation is instructive here: you can be somewhat ironic about your commitment while still being genuinely committed.
New sincerity is related to but distinct from several parallel movements. Metamodernism, a broader cultural logic that oscillates between modernist sincerity and postmodernist irony, encompasses new sincerity as one of its characteristics. Post-irony describes the cultural condition after irony's exhaustion without specifying what replaces it. Stuckism and remodernism in visual art advocate returns to figuration and emotional content, sharing new sincerity's skepticism of postmodern distance.
The Significance at Hand
In 2016, playwright Alena Smith wrote a play called The New Sincerity. A review observed that it "captures the spirit of an age lightly lived and easily forgotten, which strives for a significance and a magnitude that won't be easily achieved."
That striving is perhaps the movement's central characteristic. We live in an age of ironic distance, of social media performance, of curated images and careful self-presentation. To strive for significance, to reach for magnitude, to care about things deeply and openly—this requires a kind of courage that irony does not demand.
David Foster Wallace died in 2008, but the conversation he helped start continues. Every time an artist chooses earnestness over protective irony, every time a viewer allows themselves to be moved without embarrassment, every time someone admits to caring about something that might be judged uncool, they participate in what Wallace called the rebellion of the anti-rebels.
The new sincerity doesn't promise that sincerity will be rewarded or that emotional openness will be met with kindness. It only proposes that the alternative—perpetual ironic distance, the inability to commit to anything or anyone—is worse than the risk of being called naive.
Maybe that's the point. Maybe in an age of endless hedging and knowing winks, the most radical thing an artist can do is simply mean it.