Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form

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A New Statesman Book of the Year

A provocative theory of the gimmick as an aesthetic category steeped in the anxieties of capitalism.

Repulsive and yet strangely attractive, the gimmick is a form that can be found virtually everywhere in capitalism. It comes in many guises: a musical hook, a financial strategy, a striptease, a novel of ideas. Above all, acclaimed theorist Sianne Ngai argues, the gimmick strikes us both as working too little (a labor-sav...