Some thoughts on Weirdcore and Surrealism
I recently watched a video on surrealism and weirdcore.1 It was a good video, and I wanna be clear that this is not a reply to that video. Not fully, anyway. Watching it just reminded me that I want to put in my two cents on the way "weirdcore" is discussed on the internet. I'll come out and say it: I don't think it's a revival of surrealism.
You immediately know a weirdcore image when you see it. It probably has a hazy photograph from the 1990's or 2000's, maybe some cryptic text in red, white, or black that says something ironic and/or creepy. It probably has cutouts of eyes, possibly merged with plants or fungi, and it also probably has some kind of reference to computers, like a popup window or text that looks like a hyperlink. I'm not dissing the aesthetic here--I, personally, enjoy this aesthetic--but its tropes are very recognizable and relatively easy to imitate.
Maybe the first few people to make the images we now call "weirdcore" were doing something surreal. Maybe these were actually images that came from dreams or were otherwise the result of automatism. But, I think that once weirdcore congealed into an identifiable aesthetic that people imitated on purpose by combining very specific elements, it was no longer surrealist.
I think that automatism is a very important part of surrealism, if not an essential part, and it seems like every analysis I've seen compares weirdcore to surrealism without considering the process or intent behind the art. Yes, both weirdcore and surrealism result in uncanny, dreamlike images, but surrealism is not only the end product. Weirdcore, like many internet aesthetics, is the end product.
I think there is an important difference between an image that is surreal, dreamlike, uncanny, etc., and an actual revival of surrealism. You can make a surreal-looking image without tapping into the unconscious, but tapping into the unconscious in order to create art was what surrealism was about.
Anyway, I don't want to seem like I'm angry about this. I mostly just want to get people curious about what surrealism actually was. And, more than anything else, I want people to know that art is more than a product or object. It is also intention and process.
Notes
Patchwork Television, 2026-04-25, "Something WEIRD has Happened to Surrealism in the past 100 years..." - Neat video! They highlight some contemporary fashion that takes inspiration from surrealism, and they do discuss how ironic it is that a lot of surreal imagery has been used for capitalist purposes these days, considering that most surrealists were anarchists and communists. Their description of weirdcore also seriously helped me in writing mine.↩