Mycoaesthetics
Natalia Cecire and Samuel Solomon
Critical Inquiry 2024 50:4, 703-724
Abstract
This article analyzes the recent growth of popular interest in fungi across commerce, design, wellness, fiction, and film. Focusing on the ways that fungi are said to take the form of distributed networks, we argue that it is primarily through aesthetics that fungi are marshaled to address ecological and capitalist crisis.
Extract
We wish to describe what we see as a newly prominent mycoaesthetics and the particular purchase that it seems to have on contemporary engagements with economic crisis, ecological catastrophe, and their convergence in the biopolitical capitalism of surplus life. We argue that what we have half-jokingly called the mycological turn—an enthusiasm for fungi in the various registers of engineering, business, art, medicine and wellness, and popular culture—illuminates present impasses in the crisis of social reproduction as they relate to ecological and economic collapse.
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