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About This Event
– You must purchase a ticket to attend the event. Concession tickets are available. If you require a Personal Assistant to support your attendance, we can offer them a seat free of charge, but it must be arranged in advance.
– This event is suitable for those over the age of 16
– We are unable to provide British Sign Language interpretation for this event
– We are unable to provide live closed captioning or CART for this event.
– This event last approximately 1.5 hours.
– An audio recording of the event can be obtained by emailing publicprogrammes@whitechapelgallery.org following the event.
Transport
– To the best of our knowledge, there are no planned disruptions to local transport on the date of the event.
– Our nearest train station – Aldgate East Underground (1 min) is not wheelchair accessible. The closest wheelchair accessible stations are Whitechapel (15 min), Shoreditch High Street (15 min) or Liverpool Street (15 min).
– Free parking for Blue Badge holders is available at the top of Osborn Street in the pay and display booths for an unlimited period. Spaces are available on a first come, first served basis.
Live Recording
Please note: we audio record all events for the Whitechapel Gallery Archive. This audio material may also be used for our Hear, Now podcast series.
Who determines the shifting definitions of cuteness, and why is it so often seen as minor in comparison to other art forms? Why is cuteness seen as subordinate, given its huge influence across popular culture and everyday aesthetics, not to mention the imprint it has made on artistic movements?
Join us for a special afternoon with cultural theorist and feminist scholar Sianne Ngai, editor of Whitechapel Gallery’s most recent Documents of Contemporary Art The Cute, as she discusses the influence of cuteness with Professor Peter Osborne, artist and writer Erica Scourti, as well as author and researcher Larne Abse Gogarty. The event will be chaired by editor and researcher Louis Hartnoll.
Pick up your copy at the Whitechapel Gallery Koenig Bookshop, and find out more about The Cute and the Documents of Contemporary Art series here.
Sianne Ngai is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Chicago and a recently elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of Ugly Feelings (2005), Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (2012), and Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (2020).
Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University London. His books include Philosophy in Cultural Theory (2000), Conceptual Art (2002), Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (2013), The Postconceptual Condition (2018) and Crisis as Form, forthcoming from Verso in September 2022.
Louis Hartnoll is completing a Ph.D. in Philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University London and has taught as an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London since 2016. He studied aesthetics, art theory, philosophy, and visual cultures at the University of the Arts London, Goldsmiths, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the CRMEP. From 2021 to 2022 he was a Visiting Researcher at the Institut für Sozialforschung, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, and from 2016 to 2020 an editor at the Afterall Research Centre, London. His doctoral thesis, ‘So Much the Worse for the Fact’, examines notions of the social character of art in Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.
Erica Scourti is an artist and writer, based in Athens and London. She has performed, exhibited and presented talks internationally, at spaces like High Line New York, Wellcome Collection, Kunsthalle Wien, Hayward Gallery, Munich Kunstverein, ICA London and the 7th Athens Biennale: Eclipse. Her writing has been published in Spells (Ignota Press, 2018) and Fiction as Method (Sternberg, 2017) amongst others, and she was guest editor of the Happy Hypocrite- Silver Bandage journal (2019). She is currently undertaking a PhD in Goldsmiths’ Art Department, and is a Lecturer in BA Fine Art at Central St Martins.
