A cute white kitten with a flourish of rainbow fur has been peering out from posters on the London Underground over the past few weeks, its fluffy head crowned with a golden unicorn horn. But look again and the image becomes disconcerting. This chubby little creature has an extra pair of paws poking out from its neck, while its metallic horn looks more like a screw that has been driven through its skull. Those big blue eyes no longer seem so cute, but blank and menacing.
“We wanted to make you feel uncomfortable,” says Claire Catterall, curator of Cute, a new exhibition at Somerset House. “So we needed something a bit queasy, encapsulating both irresistible cuteness, but also a darker side.”
Eighteen such cute/creepy kitten monsters greets visitors to the show, lining the walls of the entrance like unnerving family portraits. They were generated using AI, by design studio Graphic Thought Facility, setting the tone for what unfolds as an uncanny and unsettling, but also highly seductive, show. I admit I arrived somewhat wary that this might be yet another designed-for-Instagram selfie-fest, like the “immersive” Balloon Museum or the “experiential” Museum of Ice Cream – a series of backdrops to fill social media feeds with pastel rainbow selfies. There is a bit of that but, overall, the exhibition is neither mindless influencer fodder, nor an overly cynical take on the subject. Rather, it is a thoughtful exploration of the cult and culture of cuteness that will both entrance and repulse you in its saccharine embrace. It is a sugar-coated pill with an unexpected aftertaste.
The AI kittens make a fitting starting point, given that so much of what AI generates tends to have a cute aesthetic baked in. It is hardly surprising, given that it scrapes its source material from the internet, where cute has become the default language, from lolcat memes and doggo-speak to cartoonish stickers, gifs and emojis. Cats, meanwhile, have emerged as the de facto guardians of cyberspace. When the inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, was asked to name a use of the internet that he did not anticipate, he responded with one word: “kittens”.
The first room in the exhibition is appropriately dedicated to felines, complete with a skirting board cut with the profile of a cat, one of the many enjoyable details scattered through the show by its designers, AOC Architecture. We find the trippy psychedelic visions of schizophrenic painter Louis Wain, and what Catterall describes as “the first cat memes”, little photographic greetings cards produced by Harry Pointer in the 1870s, of his pet cats having tea parties and riding tricycles. It is a reminder that the human urge to anthropomorphise kittens, add funny captions, and share them as pocket-sized images, is a time-honoured tradition, not something invented by the internet. The Victorians, after all, had an insatiable appetite for cuteness, using doe-eyed animals and rosy-cheeked children on biscuit tins and chocolate bar wrappers to fuel consumer desire.
Similarly, the Kewpie doll – which you may associate with Japanese mayonnaise and its collectible plastic toys – dates back to 1909, when it was first drawn as a comic strip by Rose O’Neill. It was made as a bisque figurine in Germany a few years later, and mass-produced celluloid versions followed, making it the first consciously cute product to be a worldwide hit, and paving the way for the empire of Hello Kitties and Jellycat soft toys.
The history lesson continues with a room on the Japanese culture of kawaii, which takes a very different form, partly explained by its origins. The English word cute derives from acute, in the sense of clever or shrewd, first shortened in the 18th century. Kawaii, however, comes from the phrase kawa hayushi, meaning blushing face, in the sense of being embarrassed or ashamed, an expression that appeared in the 11th century. It makes sense when you look at the sparkly eyed characters staring out from the covers of manga comics, and the 1930s illustrations of women with longing, supersized eyes that preceded them. The comics might look like sexist male fantasies, but many come from the tradition of shōjo manga, drawn by and for women, featuring empowering stories that defy traditional gender stereotypes. Meanwhile, the raunchy covers of Barazoku, Japan’s first commercial gay men’s magazine, launched in the 1970s, show that kawaii culture is not confined to girls.
It is no coincidence that the rise in kawaii culture in the 1990s coincided with Japan’s economic slump and the “lost decade”, with cute Harajuku streetwear taking off as the stock market plummeted. The retreat into a safe, cocoon of cuteness as society crumbles provides a sharp mirror to our current times. Carpet bombing, climate chaos, the return of Trump – but oh just look at that smol round boi! As Catterall puts it, the current popularity of cute can partly be attributed to “the general fuckedness of everything”.
A supersized shrine to Hello Kitty is a fitting place to forget about the outside world, where a triumphal arch of the iconic mouthless creature leads to a space whose walls are smothered with hundreds of whiskered plushies. This vertical mass grave of cute white faces staring out, mute, ushers you on to a little dancefloor where you can boogie to sugary disco tunes, curated by David Gamson of Scritti Politti.
Things get contemporary upstairs, where a range of artists, many born in the 90s, offer their cute wares, punctuated by five “islands” that explore different aspects of cuteness. One looks at cute sadness, showcasing plaintive products designed to make you want to look after them, from Susie Sad Eyes dolls to a wounded Japanese action figure, who looks down forlornly at her bandaged arm. Another focuses on how cuteness can foster a sense of belonging and community: a display of My Little Pony toys introduces us to the existence of Bronies, an unlikely fan group of mostly straight adult men who create pony art and seek “life guidance” from the animated, rainbow-maned horses. A third island, on how cuteness can disguise the unpalatable, includes a photo of Hitler feeding baby deer.
Much of what is on show looks ironic at first glance, but there is an underlying sincerity to much of it, particularly among the work of gen Z. Multidisciplinary artist Hannah Diamond has conceived one room as a girls’ sleepover, full of beanbags and small screens that play glossy, highly synthetic electronic dance music videos on a loop. Leaning into a kind of pink-saturated hyper-femininity, Diamond’s work tries to reject derogatory connotations of girlishness and reclaim its affirmative, transformational potential. (I didn’t feel particularly transformed, but then I don’t think I’m her target audience.)
Next door, a games arcade explores the growing genre of cute independent video games. Out are the gory shoot-em-ups of yore, in favour of “cosy” games that simulate relaxing activities such as running a cat cafe, or staying at home on a rainy day. Some take a more morbid bent, despite their cute aesthetic. Froggy Pot – described as “a short cosy game with a small side of existential crisis” – takes inspiration from the folk tale that if a frog were slowly warmed up in a pot of water, it would not notice the increasing temperature and would eventually boil alive.
Another fitting dollop of existential dread is served up towards the end, courtesy of Ed Fornieles. The artist created a range of cute characters, called Finis, during the pandemic, which have since mushroomed to a population of more than 10,000, born as “living NFTs”, whose emotions fluctuate according to the value of their cryptocurrencies. As his website explains, they become happy and buoyant when the currency they are linked to does well, and sad or even sick when it performs poorly. (When I checked the listings, many were crying or in a freefall doom spiral.)
His new film, Adventures in Symbolic Love Tyranny, features a Fini voiceover who describes cute, in their childlike chirrupping voice, as “a new kind of emergent technology, a device being used by various parties on various levels to filter, buffer, rally, manage and control”. The chubby-cheeked avatar goes on to quote theorist Frances Richards: “Cute arises by manipulating the guarantee of non-manipulation. Professing its own demure and complete powerlessness, it gains power over and directs all interactions with it.”
From cuddly OxyContin-shaped plushies to civic mascots, to the exhibition’s amply stocked gift shop, cuteness is being weaponised all around us as a tranquillising tool to coerce, control and make us consume ever more. Can you resist the sugary anaesthetic?
