Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twentieth-First Century

The interesting addresses a world of speeded-up information by asking for a slowed-down attention.

The interesting is a moving target, tracking along with the difference between norms and anomalies.

That aspect of art that really did fuse with the everyday becomes almost indistinguishable from neurotic symptoms: Interest cycles through irritating obsessions and boredom; cuteness reeks of manipulation that provokes phobias and disgust; zaniness performs hysteria or mania. Everyday art is the kipple of once-great genre tropes: cuteness is the pa

If the zany is hot, and the cute is warm, then the interesting is cool, ironic, detached, even clinical.

the zany is more likely to convert triumph into failure than failure into triumph. Think the coyote’s endless labor of trying to catch the roadrunner.

What might be novel is the ownership and control over the entire value chain through command of the information vector itself.

The zany: it’s a performative aesthetic that is hot and sweaty, anxious and excessive. It is physical and sometimes libidinal. It is about activities where play becomes a job or work gets too playful.

The interesting can be irritating, with its repetitive flick between the familiar and the unfamiliar, identity and difference, continuity and break. But its variance from the norm can be small, its affect minimal, its risk manageable.

Even just as common words, zany, cute, and interesting seem intuitively right as keys to what many people want to look at, laugh with, sigh over, and share with others. If you want to make a meme, in the general sense of a unit of media that will be shared by others, those three all work.