Twentieth-century artists turned on beauty for noble reasons, initially to avoid producing art for the pleasure of a society they held responsible for World War I. But increasingly, art’s main quarrel with beauty was over money. Expelled from high art, beauty and its companions found a home in popular art, in advertising, music, magazines, and movies. For serious artists, the beautiful became associated with the commercial, and therefore was to be avoided or attacked. That went double for the cute, anathema to art because of a wobbly fawn and a big-eared mouse. Art didn’t have a problem with selling Pollocks to the few for millions, but it did have a problem with selling Disneys to the many for the price of a movie.
Street art’s genius is to retake the tremendous power of aesthetics surrendered by art to commerce, while dodging the commercial by giving itself away. Street art is no more immune to commerce than graffiti turned out to be. The art dealers and shoemakers have come calling even faster than they did in the 1980s. But what they’re buying isn’t street art; it’s pale copies or other work. Street art is on the street. That’s why Banksy called Sotheby’s buyers morons, because they paid tens of thousands for copies when the originals sat outside for free. There, in her original frame, the little girl and her lost balloon are not for sale.
The giants of street cute are the London Police. Founded in 1998 by three expats in Amsterdam, tlp are renowned partly for the spread and scale of their street drawings and paintings in London, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, New York, Milan, Brussels, Copenhagen, and other cities. Some stand over ten metres tall, stretching several storeys up the sides of buildings. Mostly, though, tlp’s reputation stems from their distinctive character: the round-headed, smiley creatures in clean black and white they call “Lads.”
Many street artists use cartoon characters as their signatures, cute figures with the same features that make people smile more at puppies and babies than at snakes and me. They’re little, even when they’re big. They have disproportionately large heads (some are all head). They’re often orphaned in some way, lost, like Michael De Feo’s lonely flowers in concrete New York. They’re curious, mischievous, childlike. Beauty is an adult; cute is a child.
For the Hanky Panky Girls, cute is a naughty child. A popular group of French street artists who emerged in Toulouse in the mid-1990s, the hpg paint full-body cartoons of young girls who use cute’s innocence the way porn stars use the name Bambi. Fafi’s girls, the Fafinettes, take back the large eyes and little clothes from Japanese lolicon that Osamu Tezuka, the father of anime, took off Betty Boop. The group’s best-known member, Miss Van, has created hundreds of street paintings in Europe and the United States of her puckered “poupées,” sloe-eyed dolls in pin-up poses. On a wall in Miss Van’s new home base of Barcelona, one of her poupées pouts blankly, barely miniskirted, astride a litigiously familiar fawn. The girls of the hpg flout what Disney dangles. They’re Little Mermaids gone bad, street Lolitas — with the key difference that, as Miss Van says, they’re her fantasy.
Some of street art’s cute characters aren’t so cuddly. London artist D*Face’s world-weary, helmet-clad post-9/11 Tin Head wavers with the day’s news between exhausted and angry, like the rest of us. His flying D*Dog snarls as often as he smiles. In Munich, Crooked Industries’ Mr. Krook donned armour after the Iraq War. Diego Bergia’s Lepos landed in Toronto in 2004, the sole survivor of the civil wars of an alien civilization. Chased by an army of small robots, Lepos has wandered from Kensington Market to Vancouver, New York, Los Angeles, Prague, and Stockholm. He’s cute, but he’s also scared — and armed.
Cute has been driving street art from Michael De Feo, Miss Van, and the London Police to such recent work as Chase’s eye-popping murals in Los Angeles and 6emeia’s storm drain creatures in São Paulo. Like the gallery art of its time, early street art tended to be about something: Jenny Holzer’s aphorisms in New York, Blek le Rat’s political stencils in Paris. But around the mid-1990s, street art became less about the idea and more about the art, more playful than conceptual. On the streets, shock lost its shock. Pleasure took its turn: the pleasures of making and seeing art for what it is, not for what it says, or what it costs. Pleasures art forgot.
Indoors, cute is queen in Lowbrow art, sometimes known as Pop Surrealism, which took off about the same time street art got cute, and is itself influenced by graffiti and street art, along with comics, cartoons, video games, science fiction, custom hot rods, and just about anything else you couldn’t see at your mom’s moma.
Like street art, Lowbrow rejects concept for emotion, narrative, and skill, the techniques of the Old Masters instead of the theories of the art schools. More obviously, though less trumpeted, Lowbrow ratchets up street art’s affection for cute into an obsession. Virtually all of the best-known Lowbrow artists draw, paint, and program in shades of cute, from whimsical to wicked, among them Gary Taxali and Ray Caesar in Canada, and Todd Schorr, Gary Baseman, Mark Ryden, and Marion Peck in the US.
Japanese of all ages have long adored commercial cute, its army of lovable characters who spawn new products faster than you can drop-kick Hello Kitty. Japan’s kawaii tsunami has powerfully influenced the West’s cute renaissance, from Invader’s tile mosaics of early Japanese video game characters to the influence of loli-manga on Fafi and rising Lowbrow star Audrey Kawasaki. But around 2000, Japanese art took a cute turn of its own in the Superflat style of Takashi Murakami, a combination of Japan’s classical art with its pop culture. Ostensibly, Superflat parodies the shallowness of kawaii, but it also enjoys it. In The Birth of a Giant Zombie, a large ink-jet print by one of Murakami’s employees, an axe splits a young girl’s head while a tiny Bambi watches. The title makes its point, but the girl is still very cute, and very naked.
