‘Interesting’ Times: The go-to descriptor of the modern age.
Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, Reviewed.
Most of us read or look at art in order to feel something—to experience sensations perhaps unavailable to us in everyday waking life. But it’s not just our feelings. Encountering the visions of the past, we also begin to acquire a sense of how people used to feel as well. Perhaps they lived in more interesting times, where every plot moved deathward or toward maudlin ends. Or maybe their works deadpan an aloof, utterly demystified view of the world, where the only way one feels anything at all is in short, intense bursts of euphoria. Nothing seems more intimate or idiosyncratic than our feelings, of course, but what we allow ourselves to feel is shaped by the culture around us, and art indexes how those in the past understood the scope of their imagination.
These are the issues that animate the work of the literary critic and poet Sianne Ngai. In 2005 she published Ugly Feelings, a study of “minor” states of feeling and how they have been shaped and animated by the commercial culture around us. Rather than thinking about emboldening, triumphant feelings of anger, joy or faith, for example, she wrote of “envy” and “boredom,” what it means that these feelings are so ambient and natural to us nowadays. In her new book, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, she considers how those feelings help us form judgments about the aesthetic world, how we know to describe something as “interesting” or adorable (or, worse yet, “adorkable”). What does our critical vocabulary say about our present time? Is there a broader context for the conversational readymade “That’s interesting …”?
At first, talking about aesthetic experiences can seem like a dreary, specialized kind of thing. But these conversations are always about so much more than describing pretty or pleasurable things. For instance, what is the difference between beauty and the sublime? While this distinction might not strike us as particularly pressing, the two categories are suggestive of radically different ways of understanding the world, and the question—one wrestled with by figures like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant—contains the anxieties of its time. Beauty is recognition, mastery, a scale that we can comprehend; the sublime remains mysterious, metaphysical, difficult to take in all at once. To speak of beauty and the sublime, then, is to have a conversation on rational judgment and faith.