Exhibition "Cute" in the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf: Sweet disgust

Icon: enlarge

Pink flowers, dog eyes - but also intestines: collage from FALK

Photo: 

FALK / NRW Forum Düsseldorf

Aaaawwwww, an eye catcher!

On Instagram, #cute is one of the most frequent hashtags with more than 591 million entries.

Animals, mangas, toys - cuteness should convey closeness and stimulate consumption, alleviate the hardships of everyday life.

And cute beckons.

It's similar to cotton candy.

The sight of kittens playing in the timeline is as comforting as the feeling of reward on the tongue.

But at some point everyone is oversaturated with sweets, then satisfaction turns into disgust.

Even what looks cute to one person may seem grotesque or eerie to another.

How these mechanisms work is now shown in the exhibition "#cute. Islands of happiness" in the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf.

It's sugary there, full of fluffy kittens, funny babies and stuffed animals.

You can see frog hands, photographed by Jürgen Teller, slimy, but cute.

Everyday and toy design is also included: there are animated disco unicorns, Pokémons and VR games with colorful trolls.

From cute to scary

Much more appealing, however, is the break with cuteness.

Even the supposedly repulsive finds its place in the pop aesthetic of the sweet.

Film character ET is about ugly and cute at the same time.

The now deceased online celebrity Grumpy Cat looked generally grumpy.

And pop star Billie Eilish mutates from a cute manga figure to a giant spider in the anime video for "You should see me in a Crown" by artist Takashi Murakami.

There is even more ambivalence in pink and plush kitsch.

In "#cute", Brenda Lien's alienated animation "Call of Cuteness" shows within four minutes how quickly

can

turn

into

.

Lien's stream of images is based on finds with cats from the Internet.

The movie becomes more brutal with every minute.

The kittens are hunted, fixed, slit open, tanks roll through the picture.  

Artist Falk also likes it disgusting.

In collages he picks up on key features of the cute: feminine, childlike and animal elements in pink and white.

Only at second glance does it become clear that his pictures also show viscera.

Slashed kittens, a dog's look over intestinal loops: That is repulsive, but this is where winning "Cute" begins, a show that initially looks like an overkill of fluffiness.

In the 60 exhibits from art, design and everyday objects, the cute surface often hides perversion and abuse.

"

Petfluencers

abuse animals"

Mitigation is the eroticization of helplessness, says the American cultural theorist Sianne Ngai, which often creates the need to make something small or to wipe it out.

The staging of pets on social media as so-called petfluencers serves the human self-expression, says Birgit Richard, professor for new media in Frankfurt: "This can also be interpreted as an abuse of power against a living being."

Richard heads the three-year research project "

in Contemporary

" and is the curator of the Düsseldorf exhibition. Before that, she researched YouTube videos.

"Ego-Animals" is what she calls animals whose disabilities or helplessness are exploited for self-presentation.

Downplayed weapons

Belittling is no longer cute when weapons are sold with it.

In her series of images "My First Rifle" the Belgian photographer An-Sofie Kesteleyn portrayed children in the USA with the cricket gun.

They are real small caliber weapons that are sold in a pink or blue laminate for children of primary school age.

The gun lobby propagates self-defense education.  

Political actors also make use of the Niedlich reflex.

"Right-wing extremists and trolls use a cute appearance to create a misleading public image of their ideology," writes art educator Niklas von Reischach in the exhibition catalog.

The frog figure "Pepe the Frog" is used for racist and anti-Semitic agitation.

The right-wing network Reconquista Germany also uses small, innocent cartoon characters.

"

is not a

alone attribute, but always part of an overall appearance," says curator Richard, "potentially everything can be covered with a pink veil".

Your exhibition acts like a warning against cuteness.

Because under the icing it gets bitter.

Icon: The mirror