"Interesting"

Rebecca Ariel Porte reviews Our Aesthetic Categories:

“Interesting” is an aesthetic judgment so mild and so commonplace that it barely seems to qualify as a judgment at all. But that’s part of Ngai’s point. If interesting is, on some level, an aesthetic judgment, then its ubiquity (especially in critical contexts) stresses the “ambiguous status of aesthetic judgments in criticism,” as they “mediat[e] feelings and concepts.” “Interesting” is our gambit, Ngai contends, when we feel something but we’re not yet sure what to think. When we say something is interesting, we are inviting conversation. We want to be asked to explain ourselves.