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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

Over the past fifteen years, Sianne Ngai has created a taxonomy of the aesthetic features of contemporary capitalism: the emotions it provokes, the judgements it elicits, and the technologies with which it simultaneously saves and takes up more of our time Her first book, Ugly Feelings (Harvard University Press, 2005), was a pioneering work in what has come to be known as affect theory, or the analysis of the role of emotions and feeling in art, politics, and the constitution of the self It anatomised a range of ‘unprestigious’ emotions like envy and irritation, sensing within them, as well as within the works of art which express these feelings, the muffled sounds of political resistance Her second, Our Aesthetic Categories: Cute, Zany, Interesting (Harvard University Press, 2012) showed the way in which everyday aesthetic judgements – that dress looks cute! that exhibition was… interesting – are also judgements about the way capitalism has changed, at least in the Global North, since the 1970s: a transformation wherein workers are compelled into precarious shift work relying on emotional labour, while the circulation of information has replaced off-shore industrial manufacturing   Her most recent book, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgement and Capitalist Form (Harvard University Press, 2020), once again turns its attention to the kinds of offhand comments we make about works of art Who hasn’t called a novel or an art installation a bit gimmicky, when they feel it’s too obvious or try-hard? But who has realised that the same dismissal of, say, TikTok’s lip sync feature as just another technological gimmick is registering an uncertainty about the amount of effort, and therefore time, that should go into creating works of art and technology alike? What exactly is the right amount of work that should go into a painting, a novel, or a play? Figuring out why we instinctively ask these questions, Ngai suggests, is key to unlocking and revitalising the Marxist critique of labour for our contemporary iteration of capitalism   I first met Sianne Ngai in 2014 at a summer school in Cornell University known as ‘theory camp’: each year, graduate students

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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poetry

November 2013

Shine On You Crazy Diamond

George Szirtes

poetry

November 2013

And so they shone, every one of them, each crazy, everyone a diamond shining the way things shine, each...

poetry

May 2013

Ad Tertiam

Saskia Hamilton

poetry

May 2013

Rows of pines, planted years ago – so many, were you to count them on your fingers, you would...

feature

September 2015

Immigrant Freedoms

Benjamin Markovits

feature

September 2015

My grandmother, known to us all as Mutti, caught one of the last trains out of Gotenhafen before the...

 

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