Aaron Oldenburg

@aaronoldenburg.bsky.social

87 Followers 590 Following

artist, game designer, living in Baltimore He/him https://aaronoldenburg.net https://pixelfed.social/aaronoldenburg https://zirk.us/@aaronoldenburg https://vimeo.com/aaronoldenburg

A hand holds a crumpled sticker in front of a blurry car.
A flyer that says: Art Exhibition, Library Gallery, Aaron Oldenburg: Night Walks. Exhibition Dates: June 27 - August 2026, with public reception on Saturday, July 11, 2-4pm. There is a stylized image of a person on a balcony in silhouette.
Examples of some common phrases to avoid: He went to sleep. She went on a trip. He bought the farm. She’s eating a dirt sandwich. He gave up the ghost. She cashed in her chips. She kicked the bucket. He's pushing up daisies. Went to the big ranch in the sky.
A white baby doll with a lot of wild blond hair is held up by a large hand in a car. The front windshield is in the background, with a parking lot
A rickety wooden gate has one large plastic googly eye. The other eye is lying on the ground on grass and dead leaves. Green trees in the background to the left, a white house in the background to the right.
A small child, two fake adult dummies and a man in a baby mask (drinking from a toy juice box) share a pile of Halloween candy at a small table in a living room.
Freaks And (Child) Prodigies: Historicising Cuteness […] As a strategy for managing the radical Otherness of the child, cuteness is […] intimately bound up with the history of the ‘freak’. There are obvious parallels between child and freak: both are liminal figures, residing on the boundaries that separate the ‘fully human’ from the ‘less-than-human’. 4 That ‘cute’ child and ‘freak’ are reciprocally defined is supremely evident in the film E.T., which constructs an identification between child and freak (only the children can communicate with E.T.) in order to position the freakish extraterrestrial as a (cute) monster to be adopted. The monstrosity of the ‘alien’ E.T. does not diminish but rather intensifies his cuteness – in part because his desire for ‘home’ (as well as his docility) renders him sentimentally recuperable, available to assimilation within normative domestic and affectional structures. From Lori Mersh's Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics, in the Whitechapel contemporary art theory survey, The Cute
Frothy yellow blobs on an old tree stump