Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting

by Sianne Ngai

The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this radiant study, Sianne Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime.

Ngai explores how each of these aesthetic categories expresses conflicting feelings that connect to the ways in which postmodern subjects work, exchange, and consume. As a style of performing that takes the form of affective labor, the zany is bound up with production and engages our playfulness and our sense of desperation. The interesting is tied to the circulation of discourse and inspires interest but also boredom. The cute’s involvement with consumption brings out feelings of tenderness and aggression simultaneously. At the deepest level, Ngai argues, these equivocal categories are about our complex relationship to performing, information, and commodities.

Through readings of Adorno, Schlegel, and Nietzsche alongside cultural artifacts ranging from Bob Perelman’s poetry to Ed Ruscha’s photography books to the situation comedy of Lucille Ball, Ngai shows how these everyday aesthetic categories also provide traction to classic problems in aesthetic theory. The zany, cute, and interesting are not postmodernity’s only meaningful aesthetic categories, Ngai argues, but the ones best suited for grasping the radical transformation of aesthetic experience and discourse under its conditions.

Genres: Philosophy, Art, Nonfiction, Theory, Literary Criticism, Sociology, Cultural Studies

344 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2012

About the author

Sianne Ngai is Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Ugly Feelings and Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, winner of the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize. Her work has been translated into multiple languages, and she has received fellowships from the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Reviews

[Ife · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not too long ago, I went to the Broad. If an art museum should match the genius loci of the city it is in, then there are few better than the Broad – denuded, glittering, a veritably charming wasteland. As with most contemporary art museums, few of the pieces in the Broad are beautiful, in the classic sense of the word. The only one that could be described as anything close to sublime, in my memory, is Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Room, which is only cheaply so. Most of the pieces are instead puzzling, kitschy, garish or campy when they are not overtly political. The Broad, in this sense, was a minefield of curiosities evoking “minor feelings” – droll contemplation, shock, recognition – as opposed to “major feelings” – awe, submission, numinous experience. Therrien’s Under the Table had become a playground for kids. Infinity Room has famously become an Instagrammable backdrop. One had to wonder if the goers felt anything at all.

In Our Aesthetic Categories Sianne Ngai gives us starting tools to understand our postmodern aesthetic condition – which extends far beyond contemporary art museums and is also reflected in commodities, online content, memes, literature, ads and the like. She does this through turning her attention to three often ignored aesthetic categories she takes to be the prevailing ones of the situation – the zany, the cute and the interesting. Usually seen as too diminutive, equivocal, or banal to bear further analysis, she highlights the often ambivalent nature of these aesthetics and what they say about our late-capitalist relationship with performance, products, and information respectively.

Cuteness, the aestheticization of weakness, affectively oscillates between a desire to be close to our aesthetic object and to aggress it. Recontextualizing Marx, she highlights how cuteness turns us into the mother of our commodities, evoking maternal feelings (especially why cuteness is most potent in cases of helplessness or disability – she uses the example of Winnie the Pooh stuck in the honey jar.) With readings of thing-oriented modernist poetry from Gertrude Stein to Robert Creeley, she explores cuteness at the heart of modernist poetics. But cuteness is mercurial, it can quickly unwind into the scary – as in popular representations of chihuahuas or Takashi Murakami’s DOB character. One of the interesting musings on cuteness is the way it can be connected to certain political moments:

In a sense, it is not surprising that an aesthetic of smallness, helplessness, vulnerability, and deformity might find its prominence muted or checked in the cultural industries of a nation so invested in images of its own bigness, virility, health and strength. Conversely in post- World War II Japan, an island nation newly conscious of its diminished military and economic power with respect to the United States in particular, the same aesthetic (kawaii) had a comparatively accelerated development and major impact on the culture as a whole, saturating not only the Japanese toy market but also industrial design, print culture, advertising, fashion, food, and the automotive industry.

Interesting – or merely interesting – an aesthetics of information and its circulation, is animated by a fusing between art and theory. The ‘interesting’ work of art is usually conceptual, serial, relies on its exposition, and invites theorizing about it. Bringing in J.L. Austin’s conception of speech acts, Ngai argues that to call something ‘interesting’ is to prolong the length of conversation about it by conferring upon it the value of being worth discussing, even if it is unclear what the piece is saying. But this value is fraught, given that ‘interest’ affectively flickers between interest and boredom – it is both strong and weak.

Reading this chapter, I had the realization that ‘merely interesting’ is the dominant aesthetic of Instagram that people strive to, not the ‘beautiful,’ as is commonly assumed. Most people who are not content creators do not try to create beautiful images – instead Instagram images are typically meant to convey merely interesting information about our life at current. One finds oneself scrolling through Instagram thinking “oh XYZ took a vacation,” “oh XYZ is friends with YZX.” Even seemingly beautiful pictures of waterfalls, sights etc. seem to be primarily relaying the information that XYZ was there. Beauty is secondary, usually suspicious if it looks too cultivated, and if one is lucky comes from their desirability and not necessarily the aesthetic merit of the picture. Through the seriality of Instagram one then conveys that taken as whole, their life is merely interesting. The merely performs a lot of work – as Ngai notes in the introduction to call a character “interesting” in fiction is to call attention to their strangeness. The same way cuteness can unravel into scary, interesting can unravel into strange. Thus, on Instagram the dominant aesthetic is of minute variations in ordinariness.

Zany, the aesthetic of exertion and labour, seems undecided between play and work. For Ngai, this is intensified under a Post-Fordist late capitalism, but I am still sitting with this connection and like much staunchly Marxist cultural studies work, such as that done by Mark Fisher, I struggle with its taking of capitalism to be the origin or catalyst. Certainly Charlie Chaplin’s factory slapstick does call to mind a relationality with labour and production, but I wonder whether Ngai overstates the role capitalism plays in our aesthetic experience of the zany. I would think that the history of 'madness', which long predates capitalism, is more germane to understanding our aesthetic experience of the zany. I think especially when you apply the concept of the zany to non-performance art forms, the relevance of labour significantly falls away. Perhaps it is for this reason that Ngai focuses primarily on films, more so than any other chapter, though she makes nods to textual zaniness (using convenient examples like Living it Up by Karen Finley) and the chapter is organized around Nietzsche’s The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs.

As stands to reason for an aesthetic of action pushed to physically strenuous extremes (and an aesthetic of an intensely willing and desiring subjectivity), zany works of language tend to be filled with performative utterances and to bristle with markers of affective insistence: italics, dashes, exclamation points, full capitals.

However this is not necessarily labour, in the capitalist sense of the word. I am interested in the textual zany because it has increasingly become the dominant aesthetic of our current poetry where the zaniness usually comes not from labour or “performative utterances,” but from a whiplashing mix between high and low culture or from quirkiness such as in Patricia Lockwood. Perhaps I need to reread; I think the entire book bears re-reading but most especially the chapter on zaniness and the more literary and scientific aspect of the 18th century German theorists of the “interessante.”

My summary is by no means exhaustive, and Ngai’s intellectual enterprise includes many more embedded side-quests, usually quite niche and philosophical. The introduction of the book is pretty encompassing though, without the heavy argumentation of the body chapters and I can see it being enough for most readers, especially because her arguments are quite convincing and intuitive if one understands what she is trying to name with the various aesthetics. In the Broad, I would describe Jeff Koons Inflatable Flower and Bunny to be cute, Jenny Holzer’s Thorax to be interesting, and Kenny Scharf’s Inside Out to be zany.

The book also works as a great reader into aesthetic philosophy and some of its debates – are all aesthetics necessarily linked with morality? Does aesthetic judgement exist without utterance (or imagination of utterance)?. All in all, this is one of the most erudite and refreshingly clear works of philosophy-cum-theory-cum-cultural-studies I have read and I will most definitely find myself returning to this to cite it in the future.

[June · Rating 5 out of 5]

a delightful read, prompt me to retrace growth path, rethink daily living:
Marxism didn't stop me from consuming Asian cute;
cuddling naivety aged to curious dispassion and dispute
"merely interesting" in art and culture pursuit.
a life of zany acts gone awry
....just watched "The Cable Guy".

[Zo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marvelous work. A work that both made me reconsider my political sensibilities and my career path (since it made me want to do work similar to hers). Like with Bourdieu, I'm going to claim that I'm working on writing up something longer to avoid having to say too much here. Ngai's argument is that investigating the "minor" aesthetic categories of zany, cute, and interesting can tell us a lot about the cultural conditions of our current world. She comes at it from a Marxist perspective, and specifically thinks there are elements of each aesthetic category that reveal things about the operations of "late capitalism." I found her arguments for the relevance of these categories very persuasive, though I do think there are some places to push back. But, I think this book deserves a 5-star rating even if her "argument" totally fails, because of the dexterity, lucidity, and brilliance with which Ngai investigates the aesthetic concepts under consideration. What she is doing here is really a form of philosophical aesthetics, about what constitutes the aesthetic experience of each of these categories, while integrating a culturally and historically informed account of the trajectory of each category in the last ~200 years. Along the way, Ngai makes frequent use of Kant and Nietzsche as interlocutors on aesthetics, but also dips into mid-60s conceptual art, avant-garde poetry, modern commodities, the nature of modern work, and much else! Her range, and ability to bring insight into every realm she touches, is breathtaking to watch. There is much more I could (and want) to say, but I think this is representative of the best of both "cultural theory" and "aesthetic theory", and is a great model for the type of work those fields should aspire to. Apparently her next book is on the topic of gushing, so I will stop for now, but this was a borderline "viewquake" type of book.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much to admire, though felt this one walks so that A. Kornbluh's Immediacy can later run - it lacks a certain venom. Within it I learn that in US English, 'zany' is a noun. 'She's a zany'.

[Ellie]

if only all of my grad school books had Lucille Ball on the cover

[Sarah Manera]

ça donnerait presque limite quasiment envie de faire de la recherche

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Together with Ugly Feelings (2005), this book demonstrates that Sianne Ngai is the most relevant, best read/viewed critic working in contemporary aesthetics. A feminist and Western Marxist, Ngai focuses on the downsides of the post-theological culture celebrated in Manhattan, London, and the Left Bank in the 1960s and 1970s since it helped give rise to contemporary consumerism, which weakens first-world people's aesthetic lives by habituating us to tepid forms of ambivalence and disavowal of social hierarchies. Zaniness blurs the line between work and play and invites contempt tinged by anxious pity rather than empathy with scatter-brained contingent workers; cuteness is weak care and magnanimity; interest is weak wonder/curiosity alternating with near-boredom, like spending too much time on Facebook's news feed rather than reading a book, watching a film, listening to an album, having a conversation, or working on a project. After reading this book, I do not envy experimental artists working today if these aesthetic states are what they have to work with.

Everyone writing about and teaching avant-garde art should read Our Aesthetic Categories, especially since it relates trends in the arts to pop culture and thus implies helpful ways to teach experimental art by bridging it with the pop culture undergrads are more familiar with. YES, the prose is dense, but so is everyday aesthetic experience in our media-saturated culture, we realize if we slow down enough to think about it. This book plus Liah Greenfeld's Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience (2013), Brad S. Gregory's The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (2012), Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007), and Nicholas Frankel's annotated, uncensored edition of Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray (2011) shows Harvard University Press emerging as one of the top publishers of ambitious historical scholarship about modernity.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've got to page 52 in this book which is, not coincidentally, the end of the introduction. It has been hard going so far but thought-provoking. I hadn't read any aesthetic theory before, unless Adorno's Minima Moralia counts? (That probably touches on aesthetics at various points.) I don't intend to go back to this book in the immediate future as the remaining 180 pages will doubtless take considerable time and concentration. More importantly, someone has recalled it to the library, presumably because they need it for actual academic research purposes rather than general leisure reading.

Thus far, I like the taxonomy of zany, cute, and interesting. The prose in which this is explained can become very dense, though. For example:

'Yet these contradictory feelings are not held in an indefinite tension as the affects of desperate labouring and lighthearted play are by the zany, or as aggression and tenderness are by the cute. What makes the sublime 'sublime' is precisely the fact of its emphatic affective resolution, the way in which the initial feeling of discord ends up being unmistakeably overwritten by what Kant calls 'respect' (or what Burke calls 'delight').'

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

Sianne Ngai is probably where I'd put my money if I had to bet on academics whose names are going to become more and more prominent over the next decade or so. Our Aesthetic Categories is one of those miracles of scholarship that really needs to sit with the classics she's both responded to and (I feel) entirely outdone Jameson. It's a reinvention of the critical process of even conceptualizing postmodernism. Delicious but so light. Also I am so entirely here for reading I Love Lucy through Nietzsche's The Gay Science (incidentally a good candidate for my 2nd favourite N and where I'd suggest anyone start).
It's true the "zany" chapter does seem to me the strongest and I think not entirely because of that. Ngai's marxisms in "Cute" are also so crucial it's been a long time since I've felt so refreshed by reading a contemporary critic on karlo

strong recommend for if you're diving into postmodern anything

[Bryce Galloway · Rating 4 out of 5]

Posits the zany, cute and interesting as the most salient aesthetic categories of late capitalism, in part because - rather than despite - the fact that these terms are used pejoratively, for they are also used favourably, unlike others. For Ngai, Zany seems to be the aesthetic that describes works of performance and the fact that all work has become performative, like some sort of cruel reality TV judgement. Zany is the tragi comic busywork of the buffoon who juggles an impossibly array of expert tasks. Cute is the perverse aesthetic of anthropomorphized lumps of matter that beg us to covet, nurture and consume them. Interesting is the placeholder judgment that says, ‘let me get back to you, there’s something going on here,’ and inasmuch, is contingent on time, unlike classic aesthetic judgements like 'beautiful.' Interesting is also the term for 1960s conceptual art that begs, ‘interesting is enough. I don’t care about your judgements.’
A bit dense, but kinda great.

[Katarzyna Bartoszynska · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most dazzling sort of theory is the kind that starts with something that seems familiar, even obvious, and then examines (some might say overthinks) the hell out of it, so that the next time you comment on how cute your friend's baby is, you find yourself stopping, thinking, wait... what am I *really* saying here? The analytical observations are beautifully paired with an impressive set of close readings of both philosophical and cultural texts, combining an admirable depth with rather remarkable breadth. The historical aspect of the work is an intriguingly slippery one -- something I'll be pondering for awhile yet. Overall, an absolutely delightful book to think with.

[Camilla Hornung · Rating 5 out of 5]

Er kun igennem halvdelen af bogen, men den lever i høj grad op til forventninger. Hvis man har lyst til at forstå, hvorfor vores skærme er fyldt med nuttede kattekillinger og hvorfor æstetik bliver domineret af det lillepigeagtige og uskyldige, er dette en ret opklarende bog. Det er æstetisk teori, når det er bedst. (Der findes en oversat version til dansk.)

[ledi]

This book is like a drunken preacher exclaiming “Christ is love” on the early morning nyc subway. True, yet ineffectual. Perhaps like the cute, the interesting, and the zany.

[Mat Chiappe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing book!

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was really looking forward to this after reading Ngai's previous book, Ugly Feelings. On the whole, I found this an interesting book but not as fresh and acute as the previous one. The first chapter of this book is a real tour de force, it's simply brilliant. However, I wasn't so convinced by the following three chapters on the cute, the interesting and the zany which Ngai argues are "our aesthetic categories." The attempt to link these categories to a kind of diagnosis of contemporary capitalism is the weakest and least convincing part of the book. It sort of works for the zany but the other two are much less convincing. In Ugly Feelings there was also a somewhat forced attempt to use the case studies to make some larger political point but this was largely confined to the introduction. This diagnostic approach to culture--what is called in my discipline a social history of art--really isn't Ngai's strong suit, her close readings of a range of cultural objects and a very impressive range of cultural theory is where she excels.

[Erin]

"We tell people we find works interesting when we want an opportunity to show them our evidence or to present support for our claims of value in a way capable of convincing them of their rightness. In other words, we tell people we find works interesting when we want to do criticism"

Honestly, this was incredible - interesting was, in my opinion, the most compelling chapter, but the examinations into the tense power dynamics of the "cute" and the often-gendered, labor-intensive "non-productive" work of the zany are also convincing and original.

[YL · Rating 4 out of 5]

compelling (although marxist-litcrit-leaning) analysis that urges us to put aside traditional aesthetic categories of the beautiful/sublime (and really their enlightenment hegemony baggage) in favor of the minor affects that govern our most relevant aesthetic categories. Also, brilliant dissection of the categories that she deems most relevant ("the zany", "the cute", "the interesting"). Northrop Fryish in her precision.

[Carmen Petaccio · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Consider the roving provider of a household service whom Jim Carrey plays in the 1996 film The Cable Guy."

[Archie Hamerton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cannot tell you how much I utterly love this book. Standout work of aesthetic theory

[Syraled]

In her 2011 book Our Aesthetic Categories, Sianne Ngai offers a triptych of late capitalist aesthetic categories—"zany,” to evoke the performance of affective labour; “cute,” to denote the subject’s simultaneous consumption and mimicry of the commodity; and “interesting,” to localize an otherwise indeterminate value judgement characterized by the affectively and cognitively minimal act of selective attention. These categories are all unified by the fact of their being “weak” or pliable, running up against more classical aesthetic categories (such as the Sublime) which tend fundamentally towards the theological or which foster religious awe, fusing art with the with the discourse of spiritual transcendence. Instead, Ngai’s trio gestures towards our specific historical moment, one characterized by “hypercommodified, technologically-mediated conditions of production, distribution, and reception.” (Ngai 28) Whereas Ngai’s previous 2005 Ugly Feelings employed a psychoanalytic method of analysis, Our Aesthetic Categories approaches affect through a Marxist lend which allows her to identify and connect weak affects to corresponding trends in consumer culture or the ways in which commodities call out to and interpellate us as subjects; “a deficit of power which is significantly not the same as a suspension of power.” (Ngai 18) Indeed, this sense of powerlessness is the same avenue by which Ngai proceeds with her opening chapter on cuteness. “Cute” is an inherently unstable category, both inducing feelings of protectiveness or sympathy as well as an accompanying suspicion of an object’s capacity to manipulate us. The “oohs” and “ahhs” directed in a baby voice at a Hello Kitty plush toy, for instance, is an enactment of the object’s affective register, a mimetic act that transfers the powerlessness from the object onto the subject. For this reason, Ngai believes that “cuteness” can most readily be associated with consumption. Alternatively, as indicated in the second chapter, the “interesting” is most readily associated with circulation. Ngai identifies this aesthetic category as one characterized by ambivalence and “a lack of evidence” that problematizes the traditional boundary between knowing and feeling. Like Kant’s conception of beauty (which is, “famously, not a stylistic property but rather a compulsory sharing of pleasure that refers the subject to a relation among his subjective capacities which in turn refers him to a relation between the world in general and his ability to know it”) the “interesting” is mediated by a historical period where the “routinization of novelty, the tension between individualization and standardization, and the new intimacy between art and criticism” are dominant aspects of being art of a global community.” (Ngai 38) Our current information age is dominated by this feeling of indefinite seriality where art objects mechanically reproduced and disseminated at rapid speeds. The “ratiocinative cognition [and] the lubrication of social ties” which characterize the “interesting” help explain how it becomes the aesthetic category around which new communities begin to organize themselves. The “zany,” on the other hand, is the affective category associated with an agent or individual confronted and endangered by too many things coming at them all at once. Like Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy, Richard Pryor in The Toy, or Jim Carrey in The Cable Guy, the agent of “zany” is fueled by the “connexionist” spirit of capitalism—the idea that if the bureaucratic capitalism of the sixties in France restricted liberty and authenticity, the corporate capitalism of the nineties learned to benefit from offering workers more self-organized, creative, and fulfilling labour. Under this permutation of capitalism, a politically ambiguous convergence of occupational and cultural performance emerges, troubling the distinction between work and play through a constant and indistinct flow of activity. It is this last aesthetic category which feels most relevant to questions of aesthetics, performativity, and the production of needs (though both “cute” and “interesting” offer much to think about in terms of the cyclical subsumption of desire in Capital’s auo-expansive nature) The word “zany” derives from the word “zanni” which refers to the itinerant servant of 16th century commedia dell’arte. To have itinerancy—meaning, to some extent, placeless-ness—at the root of this word is interesting giving that this seems to be the most embodied of Ngai’s categories. Whether its disability, race, or gender, zany-ness often occurs within the context of a failure to comply with forms of embodied citizenship and the way this failure instigates still more activity, still more work. What is perhaps the most disturbing or unsettling implication of this aesthetic category is how it reveals what needs/commodities we’ve created in the form of “service work,” namely human feelings themselves—love, affection, and a sense of security.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very thought provoking book! Smart, insightful, ambitious, well-researched, and well-argued. Ngai claims that whereas traditional aesthetic categories like the beautiful or sublime were appropriate to art of classical antiquity or romanticism, art under late stage capitalism demands concepts which reflect the alienating and precarious conditions of social life which art helps us come to terms with. Concepts like cute, interesting, and zany express our relationship to art and production in general. By reading the works of On Kawara through Michael Fried or of Japanese Kuwaii characters through Gertrude Stein or I Love Lucy by way of Nietzsche, Ngai traces a web of connections which are at least interesting if not always compelling. I think the book falls short occasionally in holding these disparate ideas together as it attempts to show how its main categories map onto multiple three-fold structures: production, circulation, and consumption; the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque; the tension between vulnerability and aggression ("so cute i could just eat you up"), between judgment and justification (in the interesting), and between play and work (in the zany)...and so on. But overall, it forcefully argues novel ideas in an ambitious synthesis of thinkers and artists spanning centuries and a wide breadth of mediums.

In brief outline, Ngai claims the rise of "cuteness" as an aesthetic category reflects our alienated relationship to capitalistically produced art by attempting to reclaim the individuated physicality of use-values from the homogenizing effects of commodification. As with each of these categories (possibly all aesthetic categories historically), the "cute" indexes a tension between contradictory elements of art and society--in this case, between the sympathy evoked by cute objects and the impulse to aggressively attack, deform, or "squish" them which inevitably speaks to a broader issue of how we relate to consumption as such under capitalism. Furthermore, Ngai is always careful to provide the relevant historical context from which these categories and their specific forms arise. For example, in her explanation of Kuwaii art as reflecting Japan's "diminished sense of self as a global power" in the post-war period.

Ngai's chapter on the "merely interesting" is probably the highlight of the book. Here she argues, among many other things, that the "interesting" indexes a tension between wonder and evidence--a gap between seeing the worth of something and identifying exactly what that something is. It first appears as a major idea in the works of the Jena Romantics especially Schlegel and Novalis as they sought to pinpoint and flesh out what was new and compelling about art of the late 18th/early 19th century and, in particular, the novel. They identified how interesting art was serial in character and imbued with a kind of quantitative indefiniteness where final judgment is always temporally delayed. The dialectic between aesthetic judgment and justification for that assessment plays a central role since no other category so immediately demands evidence for "why" a work should be judged in such-and-such way. In Ngai's schema, the interesting corresponds to the sphere of circulation and, specifically, to the circulation of information. She analyzes 20th century conceptual art to shed light on how mass media and especially print media informed art's development and our relationship to it. Finally, she uses these ideas to delve into fundamental issues of aesthetic judgment per se marshaling the writings of Kant, Hegel, Fried, and Cavell to support her argument.

Finally, the zany reflects our attitudes to precarious labor under contemporary post-Fordist capitalist production with all its demands for flexible, fast-paced, affective, and performative work. Whether it's Lucille Ball juggling domestic work and the tasks of a chocolate factory worker, nutrition supplement salesperson, magician's assistant, and ballet dancer or Richard Pryor running around in a maid outfit in The Toy...zany comedy expresses our inherent discomfort at having to constantly adapt to the ever changing imperatives of the gig-economy, service sector driven, "hustle" which characterizes work today--similar to how The Zanni stock character of Italian commedia dell'arte satirized the material conditions of displaced peasant labor forced into becoming itinerant performers of 16th century courts.

[Conor]

Took me long enough. I remember starting this book in my flat in St Andrews, reading the introduction aloud and giggling with excitement. It's clear within the first few pages that Ngai's project is that rare combination of eminently fresh and long overdue, putting in place the last piece of a puzzle but with flair. Zany, interesting, and cute are the three ostensibly minor aesthetic categories under the microscope. Ngai provides perfectly good and captivating reasons for why minor categories need inspection, helping us understand how we utilise the major ones. The book's plot twist, if you can call it that, is predictable but no less satisfying: that these categories aren't really so minor, but describe central aspects of aesthetic experience and judgement in the post-Fordist twenty-first century. Plus, they bring into relief the limitations our old favourite categories impose on contemporary aesthetic discourse, allowing us to expand and reshape that discourse in a major way.

Let me give an example. A commonly agreed-upon component of what defines aesthetic experience is disinterested free play, untethered from utility and instrumentality. This turns up in Kant and Schiller, and defences of arts funding in the UK like using these terms too (even in the ironically self-defeating context of free play's social and psychological "benefits"). However, the zany, which Ngai rightly identifies as the most prevalent of the three aesthetic categories she explores, tests this assumption. For zany think Bugs Bunny, think Jim Carrey, think Pynchon. Unlike silliness or goofiness, its humour comes from its harriedness, its levity from its weight, its playfulness from its laboriousness. Zaniness is achieved explicitly through work, not in spite of it. Again, what's so clever about the book is how Ngai uses this example not to highlight a bemusing anomaly, but to point out something essential to aesthetic discourse as a whole. Especially in the twenty-first century, where the boundaries between work and play are dissolved, the latter having almost entirely encroached on the former, and artist's creative work is rarely allowed to exist separately from necessary labour to support their livelihoods, we must reckon more seriously with work's complicated relationship to art's free play.

Another brilliant point raised by the book is how these categories can either praise or denigrate a work, depending on the context. Calling an outfit cute might be a nice compliment, while calling a sculpture cute an insult the artist will remember for months. But more than highlighting bivalence, Ngai is able to draw out the intense ambivalence we are likely to feel towards changes to the terms of our aesthetic experience over the last hundred years. Cute and interesting especially are terms that have such purchase now because of the increased rate at which art can be communicated and shared. As Benjamin wrote long ago, and as Berger picked up from him afterwards, the price of this transferability is the irreversible loss of the artwork's "aura". But nostalgia and neophilia are both extremes worth steering clear of. Ngai's book shows how aesthetic categories that seem shifty and unclear can be helpfully capacious, allowing us to contain the contradictions and tensions that emerge and persist in aesthetic experience and criticism today. She leaves you feeling sharper, wiser, better equipped.

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

AT SOME POINT last summer, I had seen Ngai's work cited so often that I decided I had better read some of it, and the cover image of Lucille Ball (as Lucy Ricardo) awkwardly straddling a barre in a dance studio was enough to persuade me this was the one to read.

Aesthetics has been a bit neglected as a philosophical domain in recent decades, I would say. Aesthetics as a discipline developed by focusing on the beautiful, the sublime, the great, the important, on good vs. bad taste, etc., and so was terribly exposed to arguments (by Pierre Bourdieu, for example) that it was just a cover for class privilege, a camouflage for power, a ducking of responsibilities. Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just might serve as an example of aesthetics, as a discipline, being a bit on the defensive.

But Ngai gives aesthetics a whole new energy by taking up more familiar, lower stakes categories--the cute, the interesting, the zany--and using them to build a convincing argument about where art is and where we are in our late capitalist moment.

For example, Ngai connects the "cute" to avant-garde poetry and the paradoxical power that may emerge from powerlessness, the "interesting" to that which opens up to the not-yet-noticed and not-yet-articulated, and the "zany" to the increasing tendency of work to involve more and more kinds of performance (even to the need of performing "humanness" if one os a flight attendant or answers phones). She not only illuminates the language game one plays with these tokens, so to speak, but also can make rethink Hello Kitty.

Like Fredric Jameson she has a gift for turning from high culture to popular culture to high theory and back again without missing a beat or batting an eye, and however far she goes, the means of production and its relationships are never far away. The chapter on "zany" gathers in Lucille Ball, Richard Pryor, and Jim Carrey, reasonably enough, but also the zanni of the commedia dell'arte, Diderot's dialogue with Rameau's nephew, Nietzsche and Arlie Hochschild, Hardt and Negri and Kathy Weeks...and it all adds up to an insightful discussion of the unexpected kinds of labor late capitalism ropes us into doing.

[Michael Greer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let's begin at the beginning rather than with the three categories which make up the bulk of the author's discussion: the cute, the zany, and the interesting. When we write in this way we identify categories of things which the title already suggests. But how do with set the context for that discussion?

Let's begin then with several problematic terms, terms that belong to an academic register rather than to a more general, "folksy" discussion.

Genealogies of Postmodernism: By this I take the author to mean that she was impressed by Foucault's attempts to shift discussion away from historical accounts to deeper digs into the genealogical record of institutions. We are now living in an era that post-dates the modernisms of the twentieth century. So that makes us "postmodern": we lack any controlling narrative agreement about events.

Hypercommodified: Everything is a commodity. People are commodities, goods and services are commodities, breakfast, lunch and dinner are commodities, love is a commodity, animals are commodities. Call it what you will, but the market is now the controlling/unstable institution we all live under.

Information-saturated: There is now more information generated every day than the past generated over a thousand years. In one sense this is miraculous change of affairs, in another sense it is monstrous.

Performance-driven: You have to sing to earn the money to buy yourself dinner.

Conditions: Nothing in the world happens independently of specific conditions. Always place your topic in context. Always remember you live in time.

Late Capitalism: A term that communists were fond of, they viewed Imperialism of the nineteenth century as the last stage of capitalism. Late capitalism is the topic of many, many works. I recommend Ernest Mandel.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t expect this book to have such passionately detailed close readings of both Kant and Fredric Jameson, not to mention all the other works of art Ngai mobilises. It’s a really compelling reinscription of the three categories back into the history of aesthetic theory, all the way back to Kant, while also being a postscript to Jameson’s Postmodernism. I guess I’d wonder how endlessly the list of categories could go on for, but Ngai also draws clear lines in this book between her chosen categories, the complexly aesthetic ones, and other more one-dimensional judgments or evaluations — even so it’s amazing to have the idea of an aesthetic spectrum conceived and fleshed out all at once.

[Tony Gualtieri · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some profound insights here buried in a morass of academic jargon. I can imagine taking this book and translating into the vernacular much like Chaucer is translated into modern English. This obscurity is a shame because Ngai understands the philosophy of aesthetics in a way that few cultural critics do. Indeed, her understanding is so informed that I occasionally wished she illustrated her points with more examples and less quotations from other thinkers.

[Amani Marshall · Rating 5 out of 5]

what a lovely book, real erudite (amazing bibliography) aesthetic theory meets genuine interest in pop culture, its like the termite art Manny Farber talked about, circular meticulous and miniature but thats how you know she's serious. It's pretty rare to find worthwhile very-much contemporary writing on this stuff but this is it. In each chapter she finds new and illuminating points that move between aesthetic experience and material experience.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Our Aesthetic Categories is a very insightful (can't use the word “interesting” lightly anymore!) book about the aesthetic judgments that best encode life in contemporary consumer-oriented society. It does an excellent job in defining and describing the categories of the zany, cute and interesting, but in my opinion it is less effective in stating why they are the best suited to our times. Overall, happy to have read this.

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was fairly challenging going for me, as academic philosophy books are not my typical leisure reading. I consider the payoff worth it, however, because this book helped me understand more about why I perceive the world around me the way I do. The chapter on interestingness really made me contemplate how often I (even on this very website) tend to say, "Oh, that was interesting..." and what kind of posture I am taking when I say that.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has been on my shelf for years and I am so happy I finally got to it. Super academic level but connected some big dots for me. Foreshadowing of some tech era patterns that have riveted up in the last decade; very curious what her take/read would be now -- totally extended and expanded and compounded or retracted at all