Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories and Lance Hosey’s The Shape of Green

Aesthetics is a strange double branch of philosophy. Now understood mainly as the study of art and beauty, the discipline didn’t actually take up beauty as an object of investigation until the mid-eighteenth century, and the beauty of art in particular until even later. But the major aesthetic categories we have inherited, the sublime and the beautiful, come from a time when viewing art was understood to be a transcendent, sacred, theological experience, entirely separate from and elevated above everyday life. Since then, art and aesthetics have been firmly and persistently decoupled from morality by philosophy and criticism (not to mention art itself); philosophers, deconstructivists, and media theorists have torn down the mystical framework of the sublime and the beautiful in art, but without creating new aesthetic categories in their place.

If two very different theoretical books are to be believed, we ought to start taking seriously the contemporary role of one seemingly trivial aesthetic category: the cute. English professor and literary theorist Sianne Ngai implicates it as central to current problems in our contemporary politics of aesthetics; architect and designer Lance Hosey hopes it can save the planet. In both of their arguments, the role of the cute, and its appeal to our instincts toward consumption and caring, helps answer the question of art’s potential role now that it has left the realm of the sacred and become part of everyday life.

Ngai points out, early in Our Aesthetic Categories, that art is now both desacralized and everywhere, resulting in what she calls a “dialing down of one’s affective response to novelty” and, by extension, to art. She identifies three major trends that call for new categories: the blurring between art and commodity, the bleeding of work into play, and our increasing tendency to share art and aesthetic experiences using information-exchange networks. These respective trends have resulted, she claims, in the dominance of several trivial or “minor” aesthetic categories: the “zany,” the “interesting,” and the “cute.” (For “zany” think of Lucille Ball’s frenetic housewife in I Love Lucy; for “interesting” think of John Baldessari’s “pointing” pictures.)

The cute, for Ngai, is embodied in seductively diminutive commodities, like squishy bath toys: things that create simultaneous feelings of tenderness, affection, and helplessness and pity bordering on disgust. The cute capitalizes on its own weaknesses, providing a perfect model of how retail logic takes up one of our deepest instincts—to nurture—and,...