‘Cute’s potential to change our way of being could be more radical than we might ever have imagined’: Somerset House’s new exhibition, Cute, explores the potent and intoxicating power of cuteness
“Cute is all over the internet and social media – in the way we use emojis, filters or TikTok tutorials on how to do cute crying make-up – but it is increasingly taking over the real world,” says Claire Catterall, senior curator of Somerset House’s landmark exhibition Cute (opening January 25 and running until mid-April, 2024). As the title suggests, the exhibition is a contemporary account of the world’s embrace of cute culture and how it has become such an influential measure of our times. Bringing together contemporary artworks alongside several new commissions, the exhibition includes names such as Aya Takano, Mike Kelley, Karen Kilimnik, Nayland Blake and Hannah Diamond, who, through their artwork, will seek to uncover the abiding emotive charge of cuteness, revealing its extraordinary and complex power.
Presented in partnership with Sanrio – expeditors of kawaii – the exhibition will also celebrate the 50th anniversary of one of cute’s most iconic and ubiquitous figures, Hello Kitty. “The work shows how cute’s potential to change our way of being could be more radical than we might ever have imagined,” she explains. “This feels like a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon.”
As the exhibition illustrates, it would be wrong to perceive cute as one-dimensional. “Cute has a little bit of the Trojan Horse about it – it thrives within the neoliberal capitalist structures that spawned it, while at the same time undermining its very foundations with its ability to not only challenge the norm but to transform it.” Despite becoming one of the most dominant aesthetics, the disarming nature of cute allows for reinvention. Catterall continues, “It says we can be anything and everything we want to be but its playful ambiguity also helps us to navigate an increasingly overwhelming and complicated ‘now’, providing a way to live [fearlessly] in uncertain times.”
All the artwork featured comprises a range of styles and techniques that cover the vast nuances of cute, from Diamond’s sonic, hyper-pink music installation to Monstrous Other’s robotic pets and Janpanse Gothic Lolita’s subcultural fashion. The artists and musicians featured in the show use cute as a key register to explore a range of issues, including desire and longing, memory and space, ecology and capitalism, difference and belonging. “How they mine cuteness to pose questions and express their truths is a testament to cute’s chimeric ability to reflect a multitude of emotional and experiential registers,” Catterall tells Dazed. “Its porousness adds to the gravitas of the work, rather than diluting it.”
Artist Juliana Huxtable’s elegant portrayals of selfhood with lizard eyes and pig snouts examine ideas of identity and hybridity. Neither human nor animal, these creatures reflect Huxtable’s fascination with the trans-humanist element of much online sexual subculture in their anarchic representation of ways of being. (A Black transgender woman who was born intersex, Huxtable describes her self-objectification as ‘kewt’).
While Sean-Kierre Lyons’ gargoyle is a creature in the tradition of fantastical stone grotesques protecting the buildings, they preside against evil spirits. Drawing inspiration from cartoon animation of the 1990s, Lyons’s work points to its historical roots in minstrelsy and its descent from racial caricature. Like a double-edged sword, the grotesque and the cute are pulled to extremes. Counterbalanced by the other, they appear as a mirror. Catterall says, “This sculpture is one of nine ‘protector gods’ she has been developing to build a new world order. In creating gods in their image, Lyons allows them to be autonomous and complex beings, both violent and menacing, but oh so adorably cute.”
2024 marks Hello Kitty’s 50th anniversary. Celebrated in the exhibition, the iconic anthropomorphic cat’s long history encompasses everything that cuteness is and can be. Often taken up in a subversive or ironic way, what’s remained interesting about Hello Kitty is how cool she is. “This mainly dates back to the 90s to the Harajuku kids in Tokyo rebelling against the restrictions of their societal norms, and using Hello Kitty as an ally in their rebellion,” Catterall tells Dazed. ”But also in the West she was taken up by feminists, for example, the Riot Grrrl movement, who would often wear Hello Kitty hair clips or handbags in an ironic riposte to outdated notions of femininity.”
And what are the curator’s hopes for the show? “If most people come to the exhibition thinking that cute is simply a commodity aesthetic, albeit an adorable one, then at the very least I hope we will have shown that it is so much more than that,” she says. “I would really love it if visitors came away with an understanding of cute’s potential to help us navigate towards a kinder, more nuanced, mutable world, recognising perhaps that it may even point towards a new way of being.”
Cute runs at Somerset House from January 25 until April 14, 2024.
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