Cute
Imagine coming up with the most important technological innovation in modern history – the internet – and then seeing it used almost exclusively for ordering McDonald’s at 3am, arguing with strangers and sharing funny pictures of cats. This exhibition ignores the burgers and yelling in favour of the kittens, because cute, it turns out, is powerful. Cuteness here is presented as a cultural powerhouse, an internet language that’s spread its grammar throughout society, a contemporary aesthetic force with almost no equal. Does that hypothesis work? Not necessarily, but it’s fun to watch them argue it. The exhibition is a mind-melting assault on the senses, a barrage of objects, ephemera, history and artworks that shoves cuteness down your eyeballs until you want to burst (into pink love hearts). It’s complex, tiring, clever, and very good. It starts with kittens. Louis Wain’s turn-of-the-century illustrations present them as friendly, naughty little things, all big eyed and fuzzy. Contemporary artist Andy Holden shows his grandmother’s collection of ceramic felines, with their long necks and huge ears. This is the crux of cute: lovable, adorable, soft, gentle, unthreatening, childlike, innocent. It’s a set of attributes that's safe, but also hugely commodifiable. A display of Hello Kitty dolls and objects (which leads into a ridiculous, cynical and pretty pointless, Hello Kitty disco room) subtly exposes the capitalist heart of the character, its history as a tool of Japanese i