art ! aesthetic terms of endearment. cute to zany

In her new book, which builds on the investigation of aesthetics and minor affects she began in 2005’s Ugly Feelings, Ngai, a professor at Stanford University, encourages us to look beyond traditional aesthetic categories like “beautiful” or “sublime,” terms still in heavy rotation in academic contexts, to the colloquial words the twentieth and twenty-first centuries use to talk about art, especially (though not exclusively) in the American context. In this case, the terms under discussion are “zany,” “cute,” and “interesting.” Ngai wants to know what we can learn about contemporary responses to art by attending to categories “marginal” to traditional aesthetic theory and what we can learn about culture by looking at the lexicon we use to describe it.



Among such a welter of words, Ngai’s selection of the cute, the interesting, and the zany might seem arbitrary and insignificant. But what this book does so well is convince us that, of the staggering array of verbiage we’ve developed for tracking styles of art and our responses to them, these unassuming, conversational words are some of those that speak most directly to “everyday practices of production, circulation, and consumption.” They are “the [terms] in our current repertoire best suited for grasping how aesthetic experience has been transformed by the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism.” That is, Ngai is concerned with how art matters. 




The rise of the cute, she argues, occurs in tandem with the rise of nineteenth century commodity culture and, accordingly, cuteness is an aesthetic category with a complicated relationship to the commodity. 




The zanni was traditionally an itinerant worker “defined by a specifically nonspecific work: personal services provided in the household on a temporary basis.” Alone among her categories, Ngai notes, the zany is an aesthetic based in character, functioning sometimes as an adjective denoting a certain kind of activity and at others as a noun denoting a certain kind of person. The contemporary category of zany has developed a grammatical fluidity that matches the professional fluidity of its commedia dell’arte original. Ngai identifies the zany character with the multitude of roles s/he is able to take on and the frenetic speed with which s/he transfers from one to another. 




 Ngai claims that the zany, the cute, and the interesting are the categories that speak best to the constitution of “a historically specific kind of aesthetic subject: ‘us.’” 




http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=997&fulltext=1&media