Too Cute

# 584

Contemporary art is so much cuter nowadays. It really makes you feel safe.

On the verge of another Art Basel fair in Hong Kong I was thinking back to last year, and the amazing volume of art devoted to cartoon characters, big-eyed manga figures, all forms of kitsch and cuteness. The secondary fair, Art Central, was even more overrun, suggesting that dealers see big-eyed dollies as entry-level desirables for emerging collectors. This would seem to be borne out by the huge prices paid for works by KAWS, on a previous occasion, with plastic ‘multiples’ – ie. a theoretically unlimited edition – selling for thousands of dollars.

On a brief trip to London last year, I narrowly missed seeing Cute, a show at Somerset House that explored the growing appeal of items previous generations of collectors would have dismissed as cloying and insipid. Having not seen the show, I can’t pass judgment, but it sounds as if there was plenty to set one’s teeth on edge, including numerous kittens, kewpie dolls, manga figures, even a photo of Hitler feeding a baby deer. One highlight was a display of My Little Pony toys that, in the words of The Guardian: “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.”

This, apparently, was the part of the show which demonstrated “how cuteness can foster a sense of belonging and community.”

I only wish the writer had explained exactly how these grown men extract “life guidance” from their My Little Pony toys, and what such people do when they’re not being Bronies.

We find the same plastic toys featuring in another Guardian article, about an exhibition called Unicorn, the centrepiece of the grand re-opening of the Perth Museum, Scotland, following a £21 million makeover. The museum chose to focus on the unicorn, not only as “Scotland’s national animal”, which sounds a bit like Australia claiming the bunyip as its national critter, but as an LGBTQ+ symbol. Accordingly, the show included 5 newly commissioned artworks by queer Scottish artists and a “queer-friendly family space”.

For those less concerned with the queer stuff, there was also a narwhal tusk and a range of medieval bestiaries, but viewers must have been stopped in their tracks by “a mass display of crowd-sourced items – including My Little Ponies, novelty hats, rainbow-hued stuffed toys and clothing.”

It's understandable that in a show devoted to a subject such as the unicorn it might be fun to include a few pop culture items, if only to demonstrate the undying fascination of the subject and its transformations in our consumer society… but a crowd-sourced “mass display”??

And then there was the grand finale which featured “six newly commissioned pieces exploring the ongoing challenges faced by the queer community globally, including transgender inclusion, conversion practices and institutional homophobia, transforming blank, lifesize horse heads around the theme of ‘unicorn hunting in 2023’.”

At a glance this sounds like a textbook example of a museum exhibition on a promising subject, hijacked by an ideological agenda. The rationale, as explained by one museum officer, is that “queer stories are so seldom told in museums.” Another spokesperson went a bit further: “we’ve been telling the pale, male and stale stories in museums from time immemorial and for institutions to stay relevant we need to represent the people around us. It’s not just a moral consideration but a practical one.”

It would be surprising if the majority of visitors to the Perth Museum, or indeed most public museums, identified as “queer”, but this is the constituency the institution sought to please in order “to stay relevant”. Relevant by whose standards? Public museums, by definition, address a broad general public. By putting such a heavy emphasis on a single subculture there’s a big chance you’ll alienate as many visitors as you attract. Suggesting that regular museum-goers are “pale, male and stale” is a pretty good way to begin thinning out your attendance numbers.

As for the idea that queer stories are “so seldom told in museums,” I’ll simply refer you to this post on David Thompson’s sardonic blog on all things woke.

You don’t have to be homophobic to find this kind of thing tiresome. You don’t even have to be heterosexual, as I can think of many gay people who’d be angered and disgusted to think that a mass display of My Little Ponys or artistic statements about conversion practices had been staged for their benefit. Like all institutional exercises in virtue signalling, such shows risk stereotyping and patronising the very audiences they seek to please.

How did we get here? “Cuteness” is a concept that helps provide an explanation. The phenomenon has become so ubiquitous there’s even a volume in the Whitechapel/MIT Press series, Documents of Contemporary Art, devoted to The Cute (ed. Sianne Ngai, 2022). My copy was remaindered, so maybe it’s not quite as popular a topic as one might suspect.

Popular or niche, it's a subject that needs to be looked at in a dispassionate manner. Ngai describes The Cute as a minor aesthetic – “generally perceived to be diminutive, subordinate, trivial, and above all, unthreatening.” But this unthreatening nature is belied by its massive diffusion throughout western culture. Think of those ghastly mascots that seem to be an obligatory feature of the Olympics. Think of emojis, which are virtually a language in their own right. Few people are such purists that their homes are completely free of knick-knacks, which tend to accumulate like dust in our domestic spaces. Looking around, I can spot about a dozen.

When artists embrace cuteness, they often do so ironically, as in Jeff Koons’s monumental kitsch, or Mike Kelley’s soft toys that feel positively evil. Ngai is alert to the paradox that finding something “cute” allows us the fantasy of control, when we’re just as likely being manipulated by the lifelong social conditioning that lies behind such judgments.

By contrast, when Patricia Piccinini insists that her silicone, hybrid figures are really “beautiful”, she is stretching the cuteness paradigm to its limits. The scenarios and gestures may be saccharine, but there’s nothing conventionally cute about saggy, wrinkled flesh and excessive hair. One might accept “weird”, which entails its own varieties of morbid fascination, but “beauty” – even the debased form of beauty we call “cute” – is hard to believe.

“I’m not trying to shock anyone,” she says in a recent interview with The Age. “– I think they’re all really beautiful. I only put things out into the world that are beautiful, and for me, this is admirable.”

I don’t quite understand “for me, this is admirable”, as it sounds as if Piccinini is making a favourable evaluation of herself. Does she do a lot of less admirable things? But when she says her works provide “a safe space to think about how you feel about difference,” we are back in the realm of the comfortable PC cliché.

When something is cute, it is difficult to see it as anything but “safe”, but as already suggested this is not always the case with works of contemporary art. Takashi Murakami’s Mr. DOB is a mousey cartoon figure that may be grinning insanely or sprouting a vicious set of teeth. The figures in Kara Walker’s cut-outs, are usually doing unspeakable things. A percentage of big-eyed Japanese manga and anime is devoted to violent pornography.

Vis-à-vis Piccinini, I suspect we experience “cuteness” as an instant, almost visceral reaction to an image or object. Kittens and puppies are always cute. Small children are adorable, unless you’re sitting alongside one on a long-haul flight. Can we persuade the viewer that something is cute or even beautiful, simply by pronouncing it so? Should they feel uncool if they looked at the work and thought: “Yuck!”?

It's the ambiguous nature of “cuteness” that gives it a presence in contemporary art. Yet this is a world away from filling a room with store-bought My Little Ponys and suggesting they have some mystical, political connection with queer culture. They may have a small, cultish, coded connection, but this would be lost on the vast majority of viewers. The real problem begins when curators don’t appear to make distinctions between artworks that use cuteness and kitsch for critical purposes, and the kind of mass-produced junk one might buy in a souvenir shop. I’m tempted to say, in the souvenir shop of a museum, where books are being rapidly forced out in favour of trashy merchandise.

When we simply accept everything as being of roughly equivalent value, padding out exhibitions with plastic trinkets deserving of no more space than a small corner of a vitrine, we’ve completely lost all sense of proportion – let alone any standard of aesthetic value. Such exhibitions may be organised with the noblest intentions – social inclusiveness, “fostering a sense of belonging and community” – but they dumb down the museum to a level of banal familiarity, when a successful display should not be encouraging viewers to recognise plastic toys they already know, but to discover something new.

There’s a place for an intelligent analysis of ‘cuteness’ in art and society, but the non-critical acceptance of the commercially cute object is the mark of a civilisation in which the ‘likes’ of social media become the ultimate arbiters of taste.

There’s no art review this week – not because I’m lazy, but because I’ve been working on two other pieces, for the Australian Financial Review and The Australian, which require first publication rights. It seems that I’m creeping back into the mainstream by the side door, although not into the Sydney Morning Herald, which appears to have given up on the visual arts altogether. Well, there is a new season of The White Lotus, and that requires at least 37 articles… The only extra piece I’m posting this time around is the film review, which looks at Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag, a really sparkling espionage caper, starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as a pair of happily married spies. If it sounds a bit cute, rest assured, there’s no sight of My Little Pony.