Sianne Ngai est une auteure dont le travail explore l'esthétique et les émotions avec une perspective unique. Elle examine comment des catégories telles que le 'foufou', le 'mignon' et l''intéressant' façonnent notre expérience esthétique, influençant notre perception du monde qui nous entoure. Ses analyses sont incisives, révélant souvent des liens inattendus entre l'art, la culture et la vie quotidienne, offrant aux lecteurs de nouvelles façons d'appréhender les récepteurs des sentiments esthétiques.
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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