Hello kitty pfp tiktok1/18/2024 ![]() The curators of Somerset House’s exhibition will explore how an aesthetic so charming and apparently harmless – adorable animals, chubby-cheeked babies, TikTok’s “crying girl” meme – has gained such a stranglehold on our culture. Now we live in a world in which cuteness has serious cultural clout a time in which baby-faced K-pop band Blackpink are considered worthy of honorary MBEs from King Charles III, and when “cute studies” has emerged as a legitimate academic pursuit. ![]() Mickey’s metamorphosis makes a lot of sense when you consider that his masters, the Walt Disney Company, have made exploiting cuteness the key to a century of global domination – from Thumper to Baby Yoda. ![]() At the ripe old age of 95, he has never appeared more childlike. But as the biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously observed, over the decades that followed, the cartoon mouse slowly evolved from a “slightly sadistic” rodent with a long snout, to a sweet-natured creature with oversized eyes and a wee nose. Mickey had made his first appearance on Novemin Steamboat Willie. At the time he was setting out his argument, the best known icon of cuteness was Mickey Mouse. Lorenz devised a set of characteristics that might provoke such a reaction, including: a large head, wide-set eyes, short limbs, a soft body and wobbly movements. “And that activates the pleasure centres of our brains.” “Whenever something reminds us of a baby, from puppies to pandas, from a sock puppet to two dots with a curved line below them, it can trigger our cuteness detector,” explains professor Joshua Paul Dale, a specialist in “cute studies” at Tokyo’s Chuo University. What is cuteness? In 1943, the Austrian zoologist and sometime Nazi psychologist (as well as future Nobel laureate) Konrad Lorenz proposed that behaviours that create the appearance of helplessness motivate us to care for our offspring – and that the same visual cues can arouse equally intense emotions when we encounter them in animals, such as kittens, and even in dolls and teddy bears. They are the forerunners for what today has become a globally lucrative craze – from somersaulting pandas on YouTube to Jeff Koons’s balloon-rabbit sculptures – and the subject of a forthcoming exhibition at London’s Somerset House, titled Cute. In order that their human masters wait on them hand and foot, dogs have harnessed, without quite realising it, cuteness. Your cockapoo or pomeranian has soft-pedalled its savagery and made a virtue of its powerlessness, instead: rolling on its back, whimpering plaintively, looking up with big, watery eyes. True, the wolf may once have been an apex predator that ruled over our forests – but today there are none left in Britain.īy contrast, domesticated mutts are thriving, thanks to a survival strategy beyond the wit of wolves. In the fable The Wolf and the Dog, La Fontaine depicted the former as wild and free, the latter as stupid and servile.
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