80s Cool?! 

80s Cool?! is an ongoing critical artwork series that examines how nostalgia—particularly nostalgia mediated through design—can function as a powerful mechanism of cultural forgetting. In Installment One, Brett draws on the visual language of 1980s popular culture and early internet aesthetics to stage a confrontation between aesthetic pleasure and historical accountability.

The work employs fluorescent colour palettes, beveled typography, looping animations, and animated titles that reference both commercial graphic design of the 1980s and the legacy of early net.art. These stylistic elements evoke a sense of familiarity and optimism often associated with the decade and with the early promises of digital culture. The interface appears playful, accessible, and visually inviting. Viewers are encouraged to click, browse, and linger—participating in a mode of engagement shaped by pleasure and recognition.

Brett deliberately mobilizes this sense of visual comfort as a critical strategy. Beneath the surface of nostalgic design, 80s Cool?! embeds hyperlinks to historical documents and articles that trace the coordinated promotion of anti‑gay political organizing and reactionary sexual politics by influential public figures of the era, including Jesse Helms, John Briggs, Jerry Falwell, Ronald Reagan, and Anita Bryant. The project thus collapses the distance between “retro” aesthetics and the social and political conditions that accompanied their emergence, exposing the tension between how the 1980s are often remembered and what they materially produced.

Rather than treating these histories as isolated expressions of personal prejudice, 80s Cool?! foregrounds the operation of institutionalized anti‑LGBTQ ideology. Brett’s approach emphasizes how media campaigns, religious rhetoric, and legislative power worked in concert to legitimize exclusion and discrimination. The work highlights the role of visual culture and branding in this process, demonstrating how design was used not only to entertain or persuade, but to normalize state‑sanctioned discrimination—rendering harmful narratives moral, patriotic, or socially acceptable.

Presented as a web‑based project, 80s Cool?! deliberately echoes early internet structures while engaging contemporary modes of attention. Rapid navigation, surface‑level interaction, and affect‑driven consumption are central to the work’s critique. In this context, nostalgia operates as a filtering mechanism: a means through which complex and violent histories of cultural stigmatization and rhetorical violence risk being reduced to background noise beneath style, motion, and spectacle. The work asks viewers to consider how easily harm can be aestheticized, and how quickly critical awareness can be displaced by visual pleasure.

Brett’s use of net.art references is not simply an homage to early digital practices, but a means of situating the project within a longer history of online critique. By leveraging hyperlinks as both formal and conceptual devices, 80s Cool?! makes visible the infrastructures through which information circulates—and through which histories are either accessed or ignored. Clicking becomes an ethical act: a choice to move beyond surface appeal and engage with the conditions that nostalgia often obscures.

Produced in 2026, 80s Cool?! speaks directly to the present moment, in which LGBTQ rights and freedoms continue to face renewed political pressure. The project insists on the necessity of historical clarity, arguing that contemporary struggles cannot be fully understood without attention to how fear was manufactured, how policy was justified, and how harm was aestheticized in earlier decades. Brett positions nostalgia not as a benign cultural impulse, but as a potent force that shapes memory, perception, and responsibility.

Ultimately, 80s Cool?! challenges viewers to reconsider what it means for the past to be “cool.” It asks how design participates in the construction of collective memory, and what is lost when aesthetics are detached from their social and political contexts. In doing so, the work underscores a central claim: nostalgia may be visually seductive, but it is never neutral.

M.S. & T.E. Watson, 2026