‘Russian’ Imperfections? A Plea for Transcultural Readings of Aesthetic Trends

This chapter asks how an aesthetic practice which surfaces across multiple world localities can be analyzed, taking as a case study the trend to aestheticize or celebrate imperfection. This trend flourishes today across different social disciplines and world localities – from American pleas to embrace the imperfections that are a part of our everyday lives to purportedly raw-looking Danish cinema. The author uses two Russophone examples of this trend – a claim that ‘imperfection … makes us unique’ on an online dating sate and an essay on the ‘The Eroticism of Imperfection’ by art theoretician Boris Groys – to underline the importance of reading aesthetic practices transculturally. To conduct such a reading, the chapter introduces ‘transcultural thickenings’ – a concept that media theorists Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp employ to unpack translocal meaning-making processes. According to Couldry and Hepp, to fully understand cultural developments we must unravel the various regional, national, social, and other communicative ‘thickenings’ or layers that feed them. By using ‘transcultural thickenings’ as a tool to study aesthetic developments, the chapter illustrates that transcultural analysis defies both universalist and strictly nation-bound aesthetic analysis. What it promotes instead is a transnational, multi-layered approach to the study of aesthetic objects.