Good Enough Art: A Few Theses on Middling Mediations

The recent surge of “mid” as an aesthetic judgment paradoxically discloses the missing middle in contemporary cultural arts: a decline of midbudget cinema, midlist fiction, and other just fine commodity aesthetic forms.  Amid a historic eviction of the middle class, cultural study of the middlebrow can no longer rely upon the traditional sociological method.  Briefly considering architecture, photography, fiction, and television, this talk experiments with a formalist approach to "good enough art.” 

This event is presented with SPEED, at the Center for the Humanities. Please read more about them at: https://insideartsci.wustl.edu/speed-program-information

Anna Kornbluh is Professor and Associate Head of English and a member of the United Faculty Bargaining Committee at the University of Illinois, Chicago.  She is the author of four books, including Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso 2024), as well as essays on climate aesthetics, tv, academic labor, and psychoanalysis.