The Logic of the Lure

"The attraction of a wink, a nod, a discarded snapshot - such feelings permeate our lives, yet we usually dismiss them as insubstantial or meaningless. With The Logic of the Lure, John Paul Ricco argues that it is precisely such fleeting, erotic, and even perverse experiences that will help us create a truly queer notion of ethics and aesthetics, one that recasts sociality and sexuality, place and finitude in ways suggested by the anonymity and itinerant lures of cruising." "Shifting our attention from artworks to the work that art does, from subjectivity to becoming, and from static space to taking place, Ricco considers a variety of issues, including the work of contemporary artists such as Doug Ischar, Tom Burr, and Derek Jarman, and the minor architecture of sex clubs, public restrooms, and alleyways. For instance, he shows how spaces like a deserted corridor or a back room only become meaningful by virtue of what happens (or doesn't happen) there, and how art in the era of AIDS has moved beyond representation and historicization to become a raw encounter with finitude - an astonishment at the simple fact of not being dead."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Philosophy, LGBTQ+, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.