I remember a conversation with Alva, she talked about a classmate from her old academy. This ambitious boy, always in a stressed out frenzy hunched over his laptop. In the end, the outcomes were these super cutesy designs. An impression of informal, friendly spontaneity, contrasted with a mode of production that couldn't be further from it. Alva mentioned a text exploring the thesis that the aesthetic category of the beautiful is increasingly replaced by the cute, interesting, and zany. It must have been this one by Sianne Ngai, but I came away from it a bit underwhelmed, or like it didn't give me a lot beyond what Alva had already told me. (There is also a full lenght book which I haven't read.) Still, the categories seem scarily accurate in relation to what we're doing here at the graphic design department, which seems very much in the sphere of cute and interesting. The category of the zany is the most confusing to me. In advertising, sure, but in art? Or in litterature, wher Ngai is writing from (reminder to check for examples in her book). I was also thinking about how Swiss graphic design — which seems committed to the uncute and a slightly boring — fits into this trichotomy. The aesthetic of contemporary Swiss graphic design (generalizing) seems to me a kind of cool, not cool like effortless (god no), but in a sort of "sci-fi archival" way? A kind of technocratic pleasure. There is an edginess there too, a bit like the

grimes "global warming is good" billboard. Is it a more honest response to our time than the Rietveld way of almost ignoring or hiding technology. Anti humanism vs fake humanism?

This text about Mies van der Rohe seems related, the gesture of submitting to iron skeletons (grid systems), first as a tragic gesture and then as something farcially repeated.

Joshua Citarella talks about the group show Cute at Somerset House in London while also mentioning the other recent chronically online group show me and my class saw at KW in Berlin.