Sianne Ngai è un'autrice il cui lavoro approfondisce l'estetica e le emozioni con una prospettiva unica. Esplora come categorie come il 'bizzarro', il 'carino' e l''interessante' plasmano la nostra esperienza estetica, influenzando il modo in cui percepiamo il mondo che ci circonda. Le sue analisi sono acute e spesso rivelano connessioni inaspettate tra arte, cultura e vita quotidiana, offrendo ai lettori nuovi modi di considerare i destinatari dei sentimenti estetici.
The zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture, dominating the look of its art and commodities as well as our ways of speaking about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this study Ngai offers an aesthetic theory for the hypercommodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism.
Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, and Bruce Andrews, among others, this work shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening.
Acclaimed critic Sianne Ngai theorizes the gimmick as an aesthetic category reflecting the fundamental laws of capitalism. Gimmicks make promises of saving labor and increasing value that we distrust but also find attractive. Exploring the use of this form, Ngai shows how its aesthetic dissatisfactions reflect deeper anxieties about capitalism.
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