What is Cute?

[imomus]

The London Review of Books leads this month with Cute: Kitty Hauser on style in Japan. It's a workmanlike article, a review of Fruits by Shoichi Aoki (which I recently commented for Index magazine) and The Image Factory: Fads and Fashions in Japan by Donald Richie. Hauser writes:

'Acting and dressing like children represents their refusal of the adult world: as Kinsella writes, cute style 'idolises the pre-social'. Cute is a kind of rebellion, then, but its retreat to the imagery of childhood indicates that there is no alternative to the adult world except a deliberate regression to this one remaining realm of freedom. Seen in this way, cute style is bleak: it allows no looking forward to a future, either for individuals or for society. In this sense it is far darker than punk, which had an energy and rage that promised action, if not social change. Cute disguises its pessimism and political inertia as winsomeness. The curious thing about the outfits paraded in Fruits is that they seem to acknowledge both the idealism of youth and its commercialisation. Punk motifs, in particular, recur again and again, but only as hollow signifiers on pre-slashed and distressed clothing bought from boutiques. Hippy styles, too, are often assembled entirely from branded items. Coupled with cute, these motifs seem like the ghosts of idealism, clinging to the bodies of teenagers capable only of shopping and acting dumb.'

Hauser thinks that 'cute may not yet have its aesthetician'. A good start has been made, though, by Frances Richard, whose Fifteen Theses on the Cute appeared in Cabinet Magazine in Autumn 2001:

'Draw a circle, and ray out from it the abject , the melancholic , the wicked , the childlike. Now in the zones between add the erotic , the ironic , the narcotic , and the kitsch . Intersperse the Romantic/Victorian , the Disney/ consumerist , and the biologically deterministic . At the center of this many-spoked wheel lies a connective empty space. Label it CUTE.'

Comments

Re: something i can relate to?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

"post-semantic-shift" as in "after a semantic shift". One or both hyphens may be optional, but my grammar is fuzzy on that count.