Interesting article

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2012/11/sianne_ngai_s_our_aesthetic_categories_zany_cute_interesting_reviewed.html

“Interesting” Times

Sianne Ngai on the go-to descriptor of the modern age.

By Hua Hsu|Posted Friday, Nov. 30, 2012, at 11:04 PM ET

"So—what does any of this mean? There have always been things that have struck people as zany, cute, or interesting. The question becomes why these kinds of judgments predominate nowadays—what historical and cultural developments they point to, how the world around us might begin to draw on our unexamined comfort in such categories. Ngai offers Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami’s paintings of surly adolescents and fanged anime knockoffs as moments when our assumptions around cuteness—the stability of feeling somehow “above” the cute object—melt away, for these images manage to be “helpless and aggressive” at the same time. Does our sense of things being “interesting” relate to our present-day situation, where “change is paradoxically constant and novelty paradoxically familiar”? Do we long to hold and protect cute things as a way of anchoring ourselves and making the world manageably small? Is the zany workplace comedy our way of obscuring how awful actual work is?"