Otis College of Art and Design’s Undergraduate Fine Arts Department presents Sianne Ngai as the the Critic-in-Residence for Spring 2022.
NOTE: Due to the continuing pandemic conditions, for the health and safety of everyone, this lecture will be accessible for the general public only via Zoom (information on how to join below).
“Transparency and Enigma in the Gimmick as Capitalist Form”
This talk explores the gimmick as both a form that simultaneously repels and attracts us, and the judgment by which we express this ambivalent mixture of feelings. As both a compromised aesthetic form and equivocal aesthetic judgment stemming from the recognition of interlinked contradictions surrounding labor, time, and value, the gimmick offers us a surprisingly rich place to think about capitalist aesthetics and the intertwining of technique and enchantment therein.
Sianne Ngai is an American cultural theorist, literary critic, and feminist scholar. Her work is most broadly concerned with the analysis of aesthetic forms and judgments specific to capitalism, and she is known for her close attention to the overlooked, the fringe, and the marginal.
She is a Professor of English at the University of Chicago (since 2017). Previously, she was a Professor of English at the University of Stanford (2000-2007, 2011-2017). Ngai earned her B.A. and M.F.A. from Brown University in Providence, RI in 1993 and 1995, her PhD. from Harvard in 2000, and an honorary Doctorate of Philosophy in Humanities from the University of Copenhagen in 2015.
Her first book, Ugly Feelings, (2005, Harvard UP) investigates the aesthetics and politics of non-prestigious, non-cathartic negative emotions—envy and irritation as opposed to anger and fear, a taxonomy of “minor” emotional-aesthetic responses like annoyance and paranoia.
Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012, Harvard UP), which won the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize, argues for the contemporary centrality of three everyday aesthetic categories, which are approached with the same philosophical seriousness given to the beautiful and sublime.
Ngai’s most recent book, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (2020, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), explores the “gimmick” as a verdictive speech act and form encoding a series of interconnected contradictions concerning labor, time, and value. Extending Ngai’s previous investigation of the rise of equivocal aesthetic judgments (such as the merely “interesting”), Theory of the Gimmick explores the uneasy mix of attraction and repulsion produced by the gimmick across a range of forms specific to capitalist culture.
She is currently working on a book about the ways in which Marx, Hegel, and a number of writers and artists inhabit error.
Research Interests: Aesthetic Theory | Critical Theory | American Literature | Feminist and Queer Studies | Cultural Studies
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Zoom link to attend this event: https://otis.zoom.us/j/93708464588.
