In her first book, Ugly Feelings (2005), Sianne Ngai redefines aesthetic categories by shifting the focus from the sublime emotions to the ordinary ones that border on villainy and have been relegated to the fringes of the aesthetics. In Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form, she continues her investigation of the commonplace, theorizing the gimmick as a representative aesthetic category of late capitalism. Ngai closely reads plays, novels, music, opera, films, photographs, paintings, circus acts, and texts from the fields of economics and politics to examine the emergence of the gimmick as an inescapable category in the wake of late capitalism. Her selection of texts, across disciplines, testifies to the foundational significance of the gimmick in the contemporary global culture. Once again she reorients and enriches the reader's understanding of aesthetic categories through her erudition and insight.

Ngai focusses on subversive polarizations inherent in the gimmick when she theorizes it. The paradoxical logic behind the gimmick, that is, “working too little” or “working too hard” (1), “too expensive or too cheap” (3), imitates the contradictions embedded within the capitalist system that moves along the axis of growth and recession. As “an entirely capitalistic aesthetic” (53), the gimmick has become an inevitable anomaly of the world that capitalist sensibilities have created. Its currency, as a powerful and persuasive strategy, is evident by Ngai's argument that it is an “aesthetic phenomenon [that has] intimate relation to the social forms capitalism generates” (36). This is an emphatic reminder that nothing is apolitical as this establishes the anchoring position of the gimmick in the contemporary mainstream political discourse. Ngai cites Karl Marx to explain that “abstract is simple while concrete is complex” because it is the “concentration of many determinations” (175). In the post-truth world, the populist politicians enact the gimmick when they market complex social issues by oversimplifying them into absolute binaries of us and them, fake news and honest journalism, corrupt and upright leadership. The populist politicians rely on rhetoric, like an illusionist who uses sleight of hand, and encourage sensationalism to stimulate the thrill of being fooled in order to manage the public imagination. This reduces politics to a less convincing version of a Penn and Teller performance. With Theory of the Gimmick Ngai offers a timely intervention to enable us to comprehend the complex nature of the political reality of our times.

Ngai studies the gimmick in each chapter from a different perspective and lays bare its different stratagems. After a comprehensive introduction, she establishes the ubiquitous presence of the gimmick in the consumerist culture, guiding the reader to see the anagrammatic relationship between magic and the gimmick. Without being explicit, she explains the use of misdirection by illusionists to achieve their ends. She continues her argument by critiquing “concept-driven art” (105) and probing Marx's idea of value, money, and commodity. She sums up her investigation, underscoring the tension between the possibilities of the gimmick as a cognitive concept and material reality. In each chapter, she dissects selected texts and then connects them with her theorization of the gimmick. In her interviews, Ngai defines an aesthetic category as a two-sided entity that embodies form and judgment. This definition is the guiding principle behind her inquiry into the nature of the gimmick in all eight chapters that otherwise can be read as independent pieces, having their own autonomy in a strange or profound way. One wonders whether lending individuality to each chapter is a deliberate mode of resistance to the capitalist world that aims to “McDonaldize” human culture, resulting in a loss of identity.

Ngai contemplates the contemporary world's insatiable quest for novelty and superficiality. This explains the rise of the gimmick as the only aesthetic category that the late capitalist world is capable of understanding and appreciating. Ngai argues that the gimmick as an aesthetic category has subsumed art itself and, thus, becoming, perhaps, the only artistic vision of our times. The force of her inquiry secures her niche among the heirs of the Frankfurt School who breathed new life to the study of aesthetics. After reading the book one is left with a question: Is the book a lamentation on the fall of aesthetics from a sublime pedestal to the realities of the consumerist culture or a judgment on the late capitalistic world's allergic response to complex thinking, avoiding the devil that resides in detail?