“Fun!” is, by far, the most common reaction people have to my work.
At first I was offended: Fun was frivolous, trivial. I wanted my art to be serious and significant; I wanted it to challenge, disturb, and disrupt.
But then I realized that “fun” isn’t so bad. Maybe, given how bad things are in the world, making fun work/work fun is disrupting.
I just reread Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting: “In accordance with their triviality as styles, the aesthetic categories in this study are also strikingly equivocal as judgments. As a direct result of the·contradictory mixture of feelings at the foundation of each - unfun and fun, in the case of the zany; interest and boredom, in the case of the interesting, tenderness and aggression, in the case of the cute - to call something zany, cute, or interesting is often to leave it ambiguous as to whether one regards it positively or negatively.”
My work is serious. Take it seriously.