Like swallowing a pack of Parma Violets: CUTE, at Somerset House, reviewed

It’s funny how badly some 1960s films have dated. Watch What’s New Pussycat? today and you feel faintly sick. Never mind the chorus line of high-kicking cartoon cupids in the title sequence, what about the lyrics of Tom Jones’s theme song? ‘So go and powder your cute little pussycat nose…’ Yuck.

But if you think we’ve moved on, you’d better not visit CUTE. Coinciding with the 50th birthday of Japanese cartoon character Hello Kitty, Somerset House’s latest exhibition – ‘a landmark exploration of the irresistible force of cuteness’ – takes as its starting point the craze for funny cat memes unleashed by the internet. Tim Berners-Lee, when asked what uses of his invention he hadn’t foreseen, replied with one word: ‘Kittens.’ His response is quoted at the start of the show in a gallery of rainbow-coloured cosplaying kitties designed using AI by Graphic Thought Facility.

Since the launch of Caturday on imageboard 4chan in the mid-2000s, cats have bred on the web like, well, rabbits and merchandising companies have monetised the fad. Japanese company Sanrio was ahead of the curve with Hello Kitty. With her kitten ears and whiskers, a red bow and cute little pussycat nose – but no mouth – the character was created in 1974 as a rival to Mickey Mouse aimed at the Japanese schoolgirl market. But in the 1990s she went global and, with a total revenue of $80 billion, she has overtaken Mickey and friends at $70 billion. A room featuring 50 years of candy-coloured Hello Kitty merch from cushions and cases to toasters and hairdryers – including a pair of shoes with Kitty heels Grayson Perry would die for – leads through to a space upholstered in pink Hello Kitty plushies into a Hello Kitty Disco where you’re invited to ‘lose yourself in cuteness’ to a playlist of ‘iridescently luminous pop music’.

It’s not all fluff; the show has claims to seriousness. In the catalogue Dr Joshua Paul Dale, a specialist in ‘Cute Studies’ at Tokyo’s Chuo University, references Locke and Rousseau and the ‘baby schema’ identified by Konrad Lorenz as an evolutionary trait ensuring the survival of the cutest. It’s  the cartoon look: big head, big wide-set eyes, short limbs and soft body. It dissuades parents from murdering their offspring. Mickey Mouse was 45 when Lorenz won the Nobel Prize in 1973; Disney got there first.

Dr Dale traces the cute aesthetic to a Japanese artistic tradition going back to a 12th century ‘Scroll of Frolicking Animals’, but while they aped human activities, the animals in Japanese prints were never physically anthropomorphised. It was Louis Wain who first gave his cats the sparkly saucer eyes we see in contemporary Japanese manga and anime.

Kittens are the definition of cute – an abbreviation of ‘acute’, meaning sharp – because they’re cuddly, with claws. There’s an edge of danger to the English meaning of cute that’s missing from the Japanese equivalent, kawaii. Looney Tunes’ canary Tweety, based by his creator Bob Clampett on a photo of himself as a baby, is the cute character par excellence because while looking defenceless he outwits – and presides over the torture of – his feline stalker, Sylvester. He also pioneered the textual offshoot of LOLcats, LOLspeak, with its infantile pronunciation and grammar – ‘I did, I did, I did taw a puddy tat!’ – but he’s absent from this Sanrio-sponsored exhibition, which would be more interesting if its Japanese bias didn’t skew its perspective on a global phenomenon.

As it is, the show’s super-sized serving of kawaii – closer to ‘sweet’ than ‘cute’ – is cloying. By the time I reached the second-floor galleries I felt like I’d swallowed a pack of Parma Violets, and this was only the start of the serious stuff – ‘the cute in art’. But with themed clusters of ‘culturally significant objects’ dotting the galleries, it was hard to separate the art from the merch, other than by size. Art critic Gabriella Pounds suggests in the catalogue that ‘in a larger culture mired in negativity and fatalism’ the show’s artists ‘reflect an important and growing movement towards softness, hopefulness and sincerity’. Really? Aya Takano’s ‘The Galaxy Inside’ (2015) may be soft and hopeful but I’m more inclined to trust the sincerity of Mike Kelley’s ‘Ahh…Youth!’ (1991), an identification parade of thrift shop teddies including a mugshot of the artist’s spotty teenage self. Given that Kelley once condemned ‘the modernist cult of the child’ as a ‘crock’, one wonders what he’s doing in this company.

There are hints in the catalogue that exposure to cuteness might be designed to soften us up so we’re easier to manipulate. Studies have shown that cute imagery improves productivity – something Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World didn’t anticipate – and bins decorated with puppies and kittens attract more recycling. But the exhibition skates over the surface of a complicated subject. The lesson of Tweety is that cute can bite back: tangle with it and you could slink off in defeat, like Sylvester, with half your fur missing. Not a cute look for a cat.