Cute, quaint, hungry, and romantic : the aesthetics of consumerism

In this encyclopedia of low-brow aesthetics, Daniel Harris concentrates on the contagious appeal of that which is not art, on the uses of the useless, the politics of product design and advertising. We learn how advertisers exaggerate our sensual responses to eating, how nature photography magnifies the closeness of the natural world and how the mutated physiology of dolls invites our pity and affection. Harris places the refuse of consumerism under a microscope, capturing the essence of the marketplace on the level on which we actually experience it, on the visceral level of our senses - at the very instant when our neurons begin to fire as Leonardo DiCaprio kisses Kate Winslet or the moment in which the Mars Bar hypnotically breaks in slow motion, its creamy caramel center stretching into translucent filaments.