Choire Sicha
I picked six great things that are considered "not pretty," on those merits, which means that they are not plagued by cuteness. Cuteness is the hyper-kitsch of our time. It is kitsch without irony.
Cuteness has been an ever-increasing problem throughout the 00's. First it was employed as a tactic against the highly-conceptual and the aggressive--it was an excellent undermining tactic!--but over time the cute became exactly what it is: a tiny thing to be adored. Aww, cute!
Jim Windolf took on this topic in Vanity Fair, but only addressed popular culture and the Internet, where cuteness is out of control. But, we know that the cuteness epidemic--with its manifestations of craftiness, color-saturation and childishness--in contemporary art has been a terrible, demeaning thing.
Of course, the upside of cuteness is that it's always commercial. If you're an artist, and you're broke, you just make something cute. And voila! An income. So I suppose I shouldn't be too mean towards the cute. Money is never cute, but money can be your temporary friend.
In any event, here are six great things by artists that look at the opposite of cuteness, which is consumption and waste and the unpleasant. There's nothing cute about our trash, or our purchasing, or our engagement with environmental disaster, or you know, our impending deaths--or our overwhelming forced involvement with capitalist superstructures and brands. The cute things? They are what beg us not to think about these things.
