Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting | Review by Margaret Schnabel

Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. First Edition (Eighth Printing). Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. 344pp. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674088122 

This is a review of Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories. You are reading this review on a screen. You could describe what you see on your screen using some adjectives: “monochrome,” “flat,” “bright,” “square.” If you were to minimize this window—and don’t do that, because we’re just getting started—you’d likely see your device’s background image. Now the terms you’d use may be a bit different: what you see is “beautiful,” or “pretty,” or “bland,” or “ugly.” (If the latter two: my condolences.) 

What’s different about those descriptions? Each of them fuses the qualities of the object you’re observing with the emotion it provokes in you. They are judgments—aesthetic judgments. An aesthetic judgment melds the way something makes you feel (happy, soothed) with the way it is (symmetrical, vibrant, covered in flowers), and presents it back to us, your interlocutors (hello!), as something approaching the objective. When you tell us that your background is “beautiful,” you’re inviting us to agree: to adopt your perspective so that it becomes a fact. Your background is beautiful. 

“Beautiful” is one of the strongest aesthetic categories that we can slot objects into. It, much like its cousin the “sublime,” marks a particular kind of aesthetic response: overwhelming, transcendent, unambiguously positive. In Our Aesthetic Categories, however, Ngai is interested in three smaller players: the zany, the cute, and the interesting. Ngai argues that these “minor” aesthetic categories abound in modern discourse and—as apparently trivial, highly subjective judgments with a radical ambiguity baked into them—are particularly well-suited for understanding the contemporary moment. The cute inspires both our tenderness and aggression; the zany is both fun and unfun; the interesting always verges on its opposite, the boring. This ambivalence is useful, Ngai argues, because it “clarifies something that the beautiful and the sublime tend to obscure, which is that to aestheticize something is not necessarily to idealize or even revere it” (23). Think of how often each of the terms is used to mark critical distance from an object: “it’s cute,” a friend might say disparagingly of a dress, or (horror of horrors!) “it’s interesting.” 

But wait, you might object: the example I just offered pertains to a commercial object, not a work of art. This is another of Ngai’s points: that the line between art and commerce has become increasingly blurred. While art used to exist in a realm apart from social life, the “radical commodification” of the past fifty or so years has, Ngai posits, has roped art and culture into the fray of normal life, where they have become “frivolous, trivialized” (23). All it takes is a few clicks to buy a phone case with Yayoi Kusama’s iconic dots on it; even the sleek shape of your iPhone itself has been framed in some ways as an art object. This change has important repercussions for aesthetic theory, which, Ngai argues, will have to change to address the frequency with which we place fine art within a trivialized commercial context and address commercial products using aesthetic judgments. “What better way to think about the implications,” Ngai writes, “of art not longer being the obvious model for theorizing aesthetic experience than through a set of aesthetic categories each about the weakening of a traditionally conceived border between the aesthetic and nonaesthetic?” (23) The zany, cute, and interesting are “about” the weakening of this border insofar as they mark more complicated—and yet more ordinary—relationships to the objects they describe. (The cute, for instance, swaps the “disinterested pleasure” (23) of beauty with both tenderness and aggression, leading to a much more fraught dynamic between viewer and object.) 

These aesthetics are not (just) inherent to their objects. They are highly subjective, Ngai argues, and indicative of the real way that we talk about objects and ask others to consider them. Critics make aesthetic judgments; but so do all of us, every day, all the time. Here is the book’s biggest underlying premise: the way we discuss our reactions to objects matters. In the book’s dense and suggestive introduction, Ngai explores the payoffs of treating these aesthetic categories seriously. The zany, cute, and interesting, she posits, are both products of and keys into the contemporary moment. These minor aesthetic categories offer insight into our relationship to production, circulation, and consumption because they are judgments that exist at the border between labor and play—which is also, Ngai posits, where we assume art to exist. 

Ngai outlines three key aspects of our late-capitalist world: it is hyper-commodified, information-saturated, and performance-driven. Each aesthetic category aligns with (or—to use a word Ngai is fond of—“indexes”) one of these aspects. Cuteness is, in Ngai’s view, a “commodity aesthetic” (1), born out of a desire to have a simpler relationship to our commodities. The interesting is a response to our information- and novelty-saturated world; it plays a social role by prompting others’ attention (and is thus a “discursive aesthetic” (1)). Finally, the zany emerges from and speaks to an age of gig labor, despecialization, and crumbling worker protections: it is a “performative aesthetic” (1).

Each of the book’s three chapters theorizes and explores examples of the aesthetic in more depth. The first chapter, “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,” probes the ambiguity at the heart of the cute: the cute aestheticizes powerlessness, inciting in the viewer a desire to both protect it and harm or belittle it. Ngai leans on Marx to examine how capitalism has divorced consumers from the material forms or “coarsely sensuous objectivity” of their commodities by relocating their value in exchange. Cuteness, Ngai posits, marks a desire to be reunited with their physicality by fetishizing it, animating it: “cuteness revolves around the fantasy of a commodity addressing its ‘guardian’ in the one-on-one, intimate manner associated with lyric poetry” (64). Poetry has indeed long been read as cute, due to its formal and often imagistic smallness—a tradition that poses a particular problem to avant-garde poetry, which aims to disrupt traditional reading experiences. 

Cuteness, Ngai argues, is associated with femininity and domesticity, in contrast to the masculine (“micro-fascist,” in Andrew Dorkin’s words) violent rhetoric of modernist avant-gardes. Ngai explores how Gertrude Stein’s poetry wields echolalia and babble, two linguistic modes associated with childishness, to prompt mimicry in her critics, thereby emphasizing the power of cuteness to warp language. She next analyzes modern sculpture artist Takashi Murakami, who, she argues, wields cuteness for its ambiguity of viewer-object relations, crafting hurt, blistered, and abused objects. The resultant works of art are thus more difficult to absorb unproblematically into popular consumer culture. Ngai concludes the chapter by exploring Theodor Adorno’s formal cuteness in Aesthetic Theory, arguing that his subtle fixation on cute lyric poetry enables him to evaluate how “art has the capacity not only to reflect and mystify power but also to reflect on and make use of powerlessness” (109). 

The second chapter takes as its purview the “Merely Interesting.” “Always connected to the relatively small surprise of information or variation from an existing norm,” Ngai asserts, “the interesting marks a tension between the unknown and the already known and is generally bound up with a desire to know and document reality” (5). Calling something “interesting” signals that it offers just the right amount of novelty or challenge to be assimilated into one’s existing frameworks for the world. Ngai analyzes the proliferation of works of art in serial forms, claiming that the form of the series automatically makes pieces interesting by positioning them within their own framework—anticipating, in some ways, the critical perspective. Interesting, too, can be a way of shoring up the viewer’s authority, “linking feeling-based judgments to concept-based explanations under the radar—even making it appear as if aesthetic evaluations have a logical relation to facts” (128). The chapter begins in the philosophy of science—what constitutes an “interesting” discovery—before moving into Conceptual art and interesting’s self-reflexive and anticipatory qualities. 

The third and final chapter is “The Zany Science.” While “zany” is an aesthetic category, it is also, as Ngai points out, a kind of character: a laborer working maniacally to make the audience laugh. The zany is a non-specialist, a flounderer; Ngai thus sees it speaking to the de-differentiation of labor in late-twentieth century postindustrialism (and, earlier, to Marx’s description of the ideal worker under industrial capitalism: “the perpetual temp, extra, or odd-jobber” (10)). Ngai analyzes I Love Lucy to align the zany with the labor flexibility demanded of women: to be and do everything both in the domestic sphere and in their careers. Paradoxically, by overperforming, zanies have the potential to threaten and even destroy the objects of their labor: nearly all of Lucy’s stints in different jobs end in disaster. Zaniness would seem to be synonymous with fun—and yet, Ngai observes, the laborious straining of the zany character often inspires uneasy distance in the viewer, who becomes their implicit overseer. Ngai distinguishes zaniness from its aesthetic parallel, camp, for its inability to convert failure into pleasure. Camp is an aesthetic judgment that, importantly, runs counter to the original ethos and goals of the work: while the work might have imagined itself to be sophisticated or breathtaking, camp admits the failure of the work to achieve its implicit ends and converts that earnestness into irony. In contrast, zaniness demands of its characters “a laborious involvement from which ironic detachment is not an option” (12); though they dramatize failure, they cannot alchemize that failure into pleasure. Indeed, each of Ngai’s aesthetic categories point to their own failure to achieve the standards they set out for themselves—making them excellent tools for examining the relationship of art to labor in post-Fordist society. 

The book’s few shortcomings are only matters of scope—a testament to its monumental ambitions and already-comprehensive-feeling points of reference. Ngai’s contextual support more often comes in the form of Marxist and aesthetic theory rather than concrete historical developments; I found myself wishing for more precise examples of the broad-scale changes she outlines in relation to late capitalism. So too did the shadow of the internet lurk behind many of her claims: an investigation of the modern day explosion of “content creators” would fit seamlessly into her exploration of the performance- and character-based aesthetic of zaniness (and its gendered dimensions). Finally, Ngai claims that the zany and cute are erotic aesthetics; I found these moments of her argument less convincing and urgent than the essential arguments she builds about labor practices, discourse, and power relationships in commodity culture. 

Regardless, the book is irreplaceable: sprawling yet tightly argued, groundbreaking yet carefully positioned within the history of aesthetic criticism. Ngai repeatedly points out the stakes of her investigation for contemporary analysis, and the sheer breadth of the examples she analyzes are a testament to her theory’s broad applicability. It should have pride of place on any critic’s bookshelf—and certainly does on mine. 

Margaret Schnabel, Harvard University