Anna Kornbluh

Good Enough Art: Some Notes on Missing Middle Mediations

18 May 2026

The recent surge of “mid” as an aesthetic judgment paradoxically discloses the missing middle in contemporary cultural arts: a decline of midbudget cinema, midlist fiction, and other just fine commodity aesthetic forms.  Amid a historic eviction of the middle class, cultural study of the middlebrow can no longer rely upon the traditional sociological method.  Briefly considering architecture, photography, fiction, and television, this talk experiments with a formalist approach to “good enough art.” 

Required reading:

Fredric Jameson “Cognitive Mapping”  https://theradical1970s.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/jameson-cognitive-mapping.pdf

Anna Kornbluh is Professor and Associate Head of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago.   She is the author of Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso 2024), The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space(University of Chicago 2019),  Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club (Bloomsbury “Film Theory in Practice” series, 2019), and Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (Fordham UP 2014).  Essays on climate aesthetics, tv, academic labor, and psychoanalysis have appeared in venues like The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, Diacritics, Differences, and Portable Gray.  She is a member of the UIC United Faculty bargaining team and the editorial boards of Novel, Mediations, Genre, and Parapraxis, as well as the founding facilitator of InterCcECT (The Inter Chicago Center for Experimental Critical Theory), and a partner in Humanitiesworks.org.