How Metamodern Art and Culture Are Changing Us
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Before I move into the main text, I want to say clearly that I am aware that many of the names that appear below are unfamiliar to most people unless they already spend time with art theory, contemporary philosophy, auteur cinema, or architecture. That is normal.
Metamodernism is becoming more and more influential as a cultural climate, but it still does not correspond to a school-canonized field or to a list of figures immediately familiar to a broad public. That is exactly why, at the end of this text, there is a list of works and interpreters that I consider among the clearest carriers of metamodern values.
These values can be described briefly as an attempt to hold together opposites that for a long time were treated as incompatible. Metamodernism tries to hold sincerity and irony, depth and self-awareness, critique and the search for meaning, vulnerability and clarity, imagination and reality at the same time.
In everyday life this influences us more than it may seem at first. You can see it in the fact that many people today seek authenticity but do not want to be naive; they want to be moved without feeling manipulated; they seek spirituality without giving up rigor; they seek community without erasing complexity and difference.
In this sense metamodernism is not only a cultural category, but also a new emotional and symbolic education.
Metamodern art plays a central role in this process because it is almost always ahead of its time. Before a shift is understood theoretically, it is often already felt aesthetically. Art “infects” us with metamodernism in exactly this way: it slowly accustoms us to enduring ambivalence, to feeling deeply without giving up critique, and to wanting meaning again after a long training in suspicion.
Before metamodernism becomes a concept, it becomes atmosphere, image language, music, narrative style, a way of looking at the world. Only afterward does philosophy begin to name what art has already led us to experience.
Why Art, and Then Philosophy, Change the Way We Perceive Ourselves
Art does not only change what we look at. It also changes how we feel, how we organize experience, and what within us is recognized as worthy.
Recent research on aesthetic experience shows that contact with works, images, environments, and narratives can influence well-being, emotional regulation, reflection, autobiographical memory, and the attribution of meaning. In this sense, art is not a mere ornament of consciousness, but a cultural technology of perception.[1]
Philosophy enters immediately afterward, or even more deeply. If art exposes us to new forms of feeling, philosophy offers the frameworks through which those experiences become thinkable, shareable, and inhabitable.
Studies on worldviews show that we never live in a completely neutral reality: we interpret it through values, maps of meaning, implicit assumptions, and ideas of what counts.
When art and philosophy change, the grammar through which a culture lives pain, desire, hope, truth, and mystery changes as well.[2]
From a Bodymind perspective, this is decisive. We do not feel only through the nervous system. We also feel through the cultural images living inside us. Every era authorizes certain experiences and devalues others.
Some teach us to believe in project, order, and depth. Others teach us to distrust every depth. Others again try to hold critical complexity and the need for meaning together. This is exactly where metamodernism becomes important.[2][3]
Where We Are
We stand at a historical moment in which modernity alone is no longer enough, but postmodernity is no longer enough either. Modernity promised orientation, project, depth, and the construction of meaning.
Postmodernity dismantled many necessary illusions and showed that identities, languages, truths, and values are mediated, historical, and often entangled with power. The price of this sharpness, however, was at times a culture of permanent suspicion in which enthusiasm, pathos, idealism, and depth could seem naive from the outset.[3][4]
Metamodernism arises precisely in this fracture. Not as a pure return to modernity, and not as a mere continuation of postmodernity, but as an oscillation between the two. In the text that gave the term its theoretical shape in 2010, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker speak of a movement between modern enthusiasm and postmodern irony.
A few years later, Luke Turner formulated this more popularly, pointing to a stance that lives sincerity and irony, momentum and doubt, idealism and critical awareness at the same time.[3][4]
Many now fairly mainstream examples help clarify this climate. An important part of contemporary culture no longer wants only to dismantle the world, but neither does it want to return to it naively. It wants to be touched and, at the same time, remain lucid.
That is why films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Her, Amélie, The Grand Budapest Hotel, or a series like Severance can be read as expressions of this sensibility: formally self-aware, at times estranging, but still directed toward real emotional participation.[3][5]
A Short Parable: Modernism, Postmodernism, Metamodernism
Modernism, in the broad sense, is the era of confidence that the world can be understood, transformed, ordered, or at least seriously traversed. Even where it is tragic, it still holds to the idea that there is a depth to seek, a truth to pursue, a form to create, and a direction to attempt. The modern subject wants to understand, shape, and change.[6]
Postmodernism shakes this confidence. It does not merely say that the world is complex. It says that every access to the world is mediated, situated, linguistic, and historical. It mistrusts grand narratives, overly closed identities, absolutes, and linear truths.
Its central value is the critique of foundations. Its gain is enormous: it breaks apart many false totalities. Its risk is just as evident: leaving behind a culture that is very clever, but at times poor in affective supports and shared orientation.[6]
Metamodernism passes through both. From modernism it takes the desire for meaning, truth, beauty, experience, project, and even a form of utopia. From postmodernism it preserves critical self-awareness, mistrust toward rigid foundations, and the knowledge that every construction is partial.
Its typical movement, therefore, is not peaceful synthesis but oscillation. It does not say: let us believe naively again. It says, rather: let us continue to believe, feel, and create, even though nothing can ever again be pure or final.[3][4]
How Metamodern Art Emerges in the Arts
Aesthetically, metamodernism takes shape in the early 2000s, but it receives its stable theoretical name in 2010 with Notes on Metamodernism by Vermeulen and van den Akker.
In that essay, the authors do not invent a movement out of nothing; they try instead to describe works and tendencies that no longer seem readable either as simply renewed modernism or as pure postmodernism.
They speak of a neo-romantic turn and name recurring reference points such as Olafur Eliasson, Gregory Crewdson, Kaye Donachie, David Thorpe, Ragnar Kjartansson, and, at the architectural level, Herzog & de Meuron.[3]
This means that metamodernism is not recognizable through one single technique, but through a certain symbolic and affective climate. In Olafur Eliasson, one can experience an almost childlike wonder, but always through a clearly constructed dispositif.
In Gregory Crewdson, suburban everyday life becomes a visionary landscape suspended between intimacy and artifice. In Ragnar Kjartansson, pathos, repetition, gentle irony, and genuine longing coexist. The point here is not a pure return to historical Romanticism, but the return of the possibility of pathos after the long ironic immunization of postmodernity.[3]
In cinema, this sensibility becomes even easier to read. A part of the so-called “quirky tone,” studied by James MacDowell, moves exactly along that line between distanced irony and emotional sincerity.
Films by Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman, or Michel Gondry show this oscillation clearly. These works remain stylized, self-reflexive, and at times eccentric, yet they do not give up asking the audience for genuine affective openness.[5]
In architecture, metamodernism appears as a desire for form and atmosphere without losing awareness of material, time, and technique. Some buildings become metamodern not by renouncing function, but by connecting function with experience, openness, and shared imagination.
The building is then no longer just an object to be used, but a relational field holding together engineering, perception, symbol, and everyday life.
Metamodernism in Philosophy
In philosophy, metamodernism appears later as an explicit proposal. The most important name today is Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, who in Metamodernism: The Future of Theory proposes a way out of the deadlock of postmodernism in the humanities and social sciences.
His basic thesis is clear: postmodernism was right to show that our categories are constructed, historical, and linguistically mediated. But that does not mean they are unreal, arbitrary, or useless. Metamodern philosophy therefore tries to save construction and reality, critique and orientation, plurality and the search for truth together.[7]
The word “constructed” must be understood carefully here. It does not mean “invented out of nothing.” It means produced and stabilized through practices, bodies, institutions, languages, and relationships.
A simple example: a category such as identity, religion, or gender is not an eternal substance, but neither is it a purely private fantasy. It has real effects on bodies, institutions, emotions, and possibilities of life.
That is precisely why metamodern philosophy is also interesting for a Bodymind reading: it reduces reality neither to mere matter nor to mere discourse, but thinks it as a web of processes, symbols, relations, and embodiment.[2][7]
Its integral and systemic character follows from this as well. Integral not in the sense of totalizing, but in the sense of being able to think multiple layers of experience together. Systemic not in the sense of closed, but in the sense of relational.
Metamodernism does not demand that we choose between reason and feeling, critique and depth, science and mystery. It asks us to think how these poles co-produce one another without one erasing the other.[3][7]
Metamodernism in Spirituality
Metamodern spirituality also arises as a reaction to the limits of a more materialist and rationalist modernity. That modernity had the merit of criticizing superstition, dogma, and uncontrolled authority, but in many of its forms it reduced the human being to what is measurable and promoted versions of atheism or disenchantment that could not fully answer the need for meaning.
Postmodernity reopened this spiritual space, but often in highly fragmented, subjectivist forms or forms mixed with hippie, magical, and esoteric elements.
Metamodernism tries to integrate both impulses: it preserves rigor, science, rationality, and the critique of naive thinking, while recovering symbol, inwardness, ritual, limit, mystery, and human vulnerability.
For that reason it tends toward a pragmatic, inclusive, and synthetic spirituality that does not give up rational verification, but does not therefore consider the human need for meaning, relation, and transcendence to be illusory.[6][8]
The word “transcendence” does not necessarily have to be understood confessionally here. It can also describe the experience of going beyond the immediate ego, beyond mere consumption, and beyond reducing the human being to performance and measurability.
In this sense, metamodern spirituality is neither identical with a return to dogmatic religion nor with a criterionless esoteric mix. It seeks instead a path on which symbol, inwardness, and verification can speak to one another again.[6][8]
Conclusion
According to an interpretation proposed by Enrico Fonte in 2026, however, one should not get too used to metamodernism. It may be only a relatively short transition toward something much larger and harder to imagine, something now opening with the deep entry of artificial intelligence into everyday human life.
This part is not an already proven scientific prediction, but a strong cultural hypothesis: metamodernism may be only the bridge between the crisis of postmodernism and a new era in which the human being begins to redefine itself through the technologies it has created.[7][9]
This is where transhumanism enters the picture. In the general sense, transhumanism is the philosophical and cultural current that supports the use of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, neurotechnologies, and other forms of enhancement in order to expand human capacities, health, lifespan, and cognitive performance.
This is not only science fiction. It is already a real framework for debates about enhancement, the posthuman, and the transformation of the human condition.[9][10]
The cultural and psychological consequences could be immense. If the human being is increasingly thought of as something modifiable, extendable, optimizable, and perhaps partly hybridizable with artificial systems, then ideas of identity, limit, authenticity, desire, performance, dependency, relation, and consciousness also change.
Recent review work on the use of AI in mental health already shows important opportunities, but also substantial risks regarding dependency, emotional attachment, ethical standards, relational confusion, and the renegotiation of the line between technical support and human relationship.[9]
In this scenario, metamodernism may appear like the last great culture of the still fully human human being: already beyond postmodern cynicism, but not yet fully inside transhuman terrain.
That may be its double significance. On one side, it teaches us to integrate complexity, critique, emotion, and meaning. On the other, it may be preparing us, perhaps without intending to, for the threshold of an era in which the question will no longer be only how we interpret the world, but what remains of the human when its biological, cognitive, and symbolic limits become ever more negotiable. Fasten your seatbelts and welcome to Star Trek.[7][9][10]
Glimpses of Metamodernity
Visual Art and Installation
Olafur Eliasson — The Weather Project. An artificial sun, constructed mist, and a museum space transformed into an almost cosmic experience show how metamodernism can produce genuine wonder without hiding the dispositif that makes it possible.[3]
Ragnar Kjartansson — The Visitors. Musical repetition, shared melancholy, and conscious theatricality bring pathos and light irony together in a fragile but real form of community.[3]
Gregory Crewdson — Beneath the Roses. His hyper-constructed and deeply emotional suburban scenes transform everyday life into a landscape suspended between social reality, the unconscious, and contemporary myth.[3]
Cinema
Wes Anderson — The Grand Budapest Hotel. Hyperstyle, ironic miniaturization, and sincere nostalgia combine formal play with mourning for a lost world.[5]
Spike Jonze — Her. A love story with an artificial intelligence becomes a tender, post-ironic way of speaking about loneliness, desire, and attachment in the technological age.[5]
Charlie Kaufman — Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The film breaks apart memory and identity with postmodern tools, but does so in order to return tragic weight and tenderness to relationship.[5]
Architecture
Herzog & de Meuron — de Young Museum. Metamodern because it unites precise technique, living material, and poetic atmosphere.
Bjarke Ingels / BIG — The Mountain. Metamodern because it fuses practical function and utopian vision into a single form.
Snøhetta — Oslo Opera House. Metamodern because it transforms a monumental building into an open, shared, and relational public space.
Literature
Roberto Bolaño — 2666. The work holds fragmentation, enigma, historical horror, and the need for totality together without yielding either a closed explanation or pure nihilism.[3]
Dave Eggers — A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The text’s ironic self-consciousness does not erase pain and the desire for contact, but leaves them even more exposed.[3]
Yann Martel — Life of Pi. Fable, doubt, and the search for truth coexist in a narrative that makes us choose between bare rationality and symbolic meaning.[3]
Music
Björk — Undo. Combines emotional intimacy with sophisticated sonic architecture, oscillating between organic vulnerability and technological aesthetics.
Billie Eilish — What Was I Made For?. Places a naked existential question at the center within a strongly constructed aesthetic identity.
Ren — Hi Ren. Turns inner conflict into performance and unites extreme vulnerability, self-dialogue, and the drive toward integration.
Series
The Midnight Gospel — Pendleton Ward & Duncan Trussell. Combines visual chaos with authentic spiritual search, oscillating between irony and meaning.
Severance — Dan Erickson. Puts cold systemic critique and the human need for identity into tension without resolving them.
Westworld — Jonathan Nolan & Lisa Joy. Interweaves simulation and consciousness, bringing systemic control into tension with the authentic search for freedom and identity.
Philosophy and Theory
Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker — Notes on Metamodernism. This text gives the new sensibility its theoretical name and defines it as an oscillation between modern enthusiasm and postmodern irony.[3]
Luke Turner — The Metamodernist Manifesto. He translates this climate into a more public and programmatic formula, emphasizing life between and beyond sincerity and irony, doubt and momentum.[4]
Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm — Metamodernism: The Future of Theory. He anchors metamodernism at the center of contemporary theory and proposes a way of thinking that preserves postmodern critique while rehabilitating reality, values, and the search for truth.[7]
Notes
M. K. D. Trupp et al., “The impact of viewing art on well-being—a systematic review of the evidence base and suggested mechanisms”, The Journal of Positive Psychology, 2025.
R. Mifsud et al., “Worldviews and the role of social values that underlie them”, 2023.
Timotheus Vermeulen, Robin van den Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism”, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2010.
Luke Turner, “Metamodernism: A Brief Introduction”, 2015, und The Metamodernist Manifesto.
James MacDowell, “Quirky Tone and Metamodernism”.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entry “Postmodernism”, und Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, entry “Spirituality and Contemporary Art”.
Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory, University of Chicago Press, 2021.
On contemporary art and spirituality as a space that cannot be reduced either to institutional religion or to mere cultural surface.
“Transhumanism”, Encyclopaedia Britannica, aktualisiert am 7. April 2026; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entry “Human Enhancement”; and recent reviews on AI and mental health.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entry “Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics”.
