15 Jun Kunstforum #289 – Cuteness
Das Niedliche als ästhetische Kategorie
There is a new aesthetic category in the arts: Cuteness! What?! Cute art? For a long time, that was considered a contradiction in terms. Art could be many things – but certainly not cute. While other motifs of consumer and popular culture were taken up as a matter of course through readymades, pop art or appropriation art, “cuteness” long remained one of the last taboos in the visual arts.
But globalisation and social media continue to challenge established notions of art and forms of work – as they do when cuteness enters the realm of visual art, as in Leslie Holt’s ongoing series Hello Masterpiece, which has the most famous kitten in contemporary consumer culture, Hello Kitty, meet the world’s most important works of art.