When Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, was asked to name one use of the Internet that he did not anticipate, he answered with a single word: “Kittens.”
This is the story told at the entrance to the new exhibition “Cute,” running at London’s Somerset House until April 14. And to prove its point, you are almost immediately greeted with the imposing sight of what can only be described as several walls of cats. One of them, encased in glass, comprises dozens of ceramic cats, all peering out emotionlessly at the visitors.
The other is even more terrifying. It’s a sort of giant Hello Kitty topiary, wherein thousands of Hello Kitty plush toys—apparently culled from the collection of a single Hello Kitty super-fan—are stitched together. The result looks less like an adorable Japanese emblem and more like a sort of nightmarish tumor. To make things even more confusing, the exhibition exists largely to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Hello Kitty.
The unsettling feeling you’re left with, however, is intended. The goal of “Cute,” which was curated by Claire Catterall, the longtime head of exhibitions at Somerset House, is to show how overwhelmingly in thrall to cuteness we have become. Cuteness is everywhere all the time—culture, commercials, toys, social media—to such an extent that we’ve become desensitized to how completely oppressive it is. The genius of “Cute,” then, is the sly way in which it shows how cuteness is used to distract us from the terror of the real world.
As you make your way around the exhibition, the early explosion of innocence you encounter—a Hello Kitty disco, blaring out bubblegum hits from “Sugar, Sugar” to “I Want Candy”—gradually begins to decay. There’s an arcade room, full of incredibly cute computer games. One of them is Donut County, a 2018 game where you disrupt a sequence of adorable landscapes by hurling everything available into a yawning, bottomless hole. Another display—Killer Whale with Long Eyelashes (Rhino Version), by Cosima von Bonin—shows a vast, cuddly orca, slumped listlessly on a chair. “We are prompted to ask what toll late capitalism has taken on this creature’s life,” the index card next to it bleakly states.
The goal of “Cute” is to show how overwhelmingly in thrall to cuteness we have become.
The exhibition continues. There’s a photograph of women smiling in rubber pool inflatables; closer inspection reveals that they are North Korean, and their expressions are hollow and terrified. The Duolingo owl hoots, “Five in a row! Well done! Your family is safe today!” There is a pair of Juliana Huxtable prints of cute, brightly colored animal figures offering themselves up sexually. Then there’s Julien Ceccaldi’s Door to Cockaigne, a huge, haunting eye staring through an opening, petrified by what it can see.
As you walk around “Cute,” you’re likely to see reams and reams of cultured Gen Z–ers noisily posing for selfies. And if that’s why you visit, then you won’t be disappointed. But by the final display—an ominous video projected against the wall of a blackened room, accompanied by a constant, sinister clanging—those people will have been soundly cowed into silence. And that’s “Cute” in a nutshell. Come for the kittens, stay for the gnawing sense of existential dread.
“Cute” is on at Somerset House in London until April 14
Stuart Heritage is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. He is the author of Bald: How I Slowly Learned to Not Hate Having No Hair (And You Can Too)