Kornbluh (Courtesy of the Center for the Humanities)

Anna Kornbluh, a visiting professor and associate head of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, described her latest work on the term “mid” as a new aesthetic at an event hosted by WashU’s English department, Oct. 2. Kornbluh said that rising social and economic polarization was giving rise to new forms of art, particularly those expressing sentiments of a missing middle ground. Kornbluh laid down a potential framework for analyzing “mid art”  or “good-enough art,” as she put it. Cracking jokes along the way, Kornbluh made her case for the study and appreciation of “good-enough art.” Here are four takeaways from her talk:

1. Art exists across a spectrum. “Good-enough art”  lies somewhere between “fine art” and art that is more appealing to the masses. This position makes “good-enough art” difficult to describe and so undesirable, according to Kornbluh, but she argued that this shouldn’t diminish its importance.

“I do think that [mid art] is worth trying to define, to try to take it out of that ambiguity, because I think that ‘middle works’ actually operate culturally in important ways,” Kornbluh said. “[Art] that is ‘good enough’ invites a lot of people to engage with it, and it helps those people feel like there’s something real there.”

2. Kornbluh said that the emergence of “good-enough art” was a reflection of a declining middle class.

“Our economy is doing what you might call in business school ‘bifurcation.’ The markets are separating into extreme highs and extreme lows, and class relations, income distribution, property ownership, and stock market activity are also doing this kind of bifurcating,” Kornbluh said. “So, people are trying to look for the ‘mid’ and find it. That desire to even use that word seems to me to reveal that there’s a problem about, how do we value the middle, or where is it, or is it missing?”

3. “Good-enough art” is expressed through many mediums, like architecture, photography, film, and literature. Kornbluh described how the Northtown Library and Apartments project in Chicago combined residential space with a full-sized library, steering away from traditional projects that would have left the two functions separate. Kornbluh said that this multipurposedness was a defining characteristic of “good-enough art.” 

“Most critics and philosophers in the history of aesthetics and of art criticism would say that art is supposed to not be functional, that the whole way we define art is that it’s functionless,” Kornbluh said. “[But] what if there are things that are beautiful and engaged enough with a history of art before them … but also still doing some kind of intervention in our social lives, like providing housing that is co-located with a social service, like a library?”

4. Kornbluh said that there is value in being “mid,” even if the word today is derogatory.

“It’s true, most artists want to be great. But there’s actually a lot of social value in being medium because you help a lot of people understand things. You make their lives better, you give them pleasure, [and] you give them opportunities for making meaning and engaging in conversation with other people around them,” Kornbluh said. “And I think that that value has been underestimated and understated, and that value is a piece of the puzzle.”

Bonnie Pang, a fifth-year English Ph.D. student who helped organize the event, said she appreciated Kornbluh’s optimism. 

“It’s nice, in a way, to come to a talk about literary criticism and have it be somewhat optimistic, instead of, ‘English is dying. People who do English majors will end up being Starbucks baristas,’” Pang said. “Sometimes it’s nice just to put that aside and just be like, ‘Oh, actually, maybe there is something optimistic about what we do.’”