Hi! This month, I worked on some drawings, a demo of a song, and an archive of strikingly ugly images.

"Alice DJing", 9x12", pen and marker on paper, June 2026

I keep singing Pet Shop Boys at work and felt inspired to write a weird, homoerotic song about capitalism using one of the Korg Electribe loops I made last month:

"Heather's Desk 2", 5.25x8.25", pen and gouache on paper, June 2026

Sometimes, when I'm searching for art references in DuckDuckGo, I find images that my brain completely ignores at first. Maybe they are mundanely ugly, or obviously AI-generated, or they advertise dubious products. I see so many haphazardly created images that I feel exhausted and my eyes automatically filter out the majority of search results. A decade or two ago, a low-quality image might be pixelated, fried, or poorly edited. Now we have crisp, high-definition slop. I remember a disorenting adjustment period in 2023-2024 where I couldn't easily tell what was worthy of my attention. But it seems that my internal slop gauge has caught up.

I've been trying to turn my sense of judgement off and actually look at each image, even if it means I get overwhelmed quicker and can't find what I'm actually looking for. These images reveal as much about modern aesthetics as art created by a professional designer. It's like looking at an unflattering candid instead of a carefully posed selfie. Some of the images that I ignored at first become so striking that I've been saving my favorites. The more I look at them, disregarding their context and any associations I may have to focus only on their appearance, the more mysterious and beautiful I find them. I wonder how much human intervention was involved in their production. Who made them, or prompted an LLM to make them? Where does that person live? How do they view their creations?

The garish Y2K ads and amateur graphics in the GifCities archive look quaint and charming now. Will our perception of today's lowbrow images evolve similarly over the coming decades? Or does the ease of their creation make them feel too impersonal? I decided to start the Archive For Future Nostalgia so I could organize them all in one place and notice how my feelings towards them change over time.

Archive For Future Nostalgia

Some images are so exemplary of their time that they disappear. Some images are so heavy with associations that their beauty is obscured. Some images look ugly because we haven't learned how to see them yet.

All of the following images are beautiful. Their unique character will only be revealed by the patina of nostalgia. They have been catalogued here so that their mystery can be better understood with time.

At a rave a few weeks ago, I got cornered by a Finance Bro who was obviously on molly. He was trying to explain his work to me and I couldn't tell if it was incomprehensible because he was rolling or because he didn't really understand what his job was either. He finally got distracted and I escaped, feeling shaken and spun to the point of nausea. I keep finding tech- and business-related magazines from 5 to 10 years ago on the side of the road. They use absurdly optimistic yet meaningless language predicting AI, crypto, and the future. I've been cutting up the text and combining it with other sources to make Finance Bro Poetry. This is one Finance Bro Poem that I finished. The illustration is of an anthromorphic stack of $100 bills that I bought for 25 cents at a yard sale recently, which seemed like a good deal.

"The Side Hustle That Created Everlasting Life", 9x12", pen, marker, and cut up text on paper, June 2026

I'm also working on a comic, but I found myself feeling rushed and impatient with it so I decided to take a break. Here are a couple pages that I've worked on so far.

"This Is So Embarrassing (Page 4)", digital, June 2026

"This Is So Embarrassing (Page 12)", digital, June 2026

1. [Side A - Track 1] - Tigist Mekonen [link / link]
2. "Creep" - fakemink
3. "Bertha De Sade" - Agnes Bernelle
4. "have u ever been mellow(boy witch edit)" - angels are real! [link]
5. "ARE U HAPPY?" - JPEGMAFIA
6. "BEAUTIFUL LOVE PROD BY ODESZA" - Black Kray
7. "Truly Dreams" - Allie X
8. "3 Noches" - J Balvin
9. "The Wheel" - Edie Brickell & New Bohemians
10. "Jungle-Affair" - fakemink
11. "Lucky Cloud" - Arthur Russell
12. "Angst In My Pants" - Sparks

Thanks for looking! Contact max@maxwickstrom.com.
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