Cute Grew Teeth — The Art World Takes Cuteness Seriously
- 7 hours ago
- 2 min read
For years cuteness was something serious art kept at a distance. It read as kitsch, decorative, the easy way to please. That has changed. Cuteness is now a subject of real academic research, somewhere between art history, psychology and neuroscience, and plenty of artists treat it as a tool rather than a weakness.
The clearest sign of the shift is Labubu, the snaggle-toothed creature from Pop Mart's blind boxes. It has become one of the most collected objects in the world, a billion-dollar character that hangs off designer handbags and sells out in minutes. Academics already have a word for the look: post-kawaii, cuteness with a bit of menace in it, closer to a gremlin than a teddy bear.
Artists got there first. Charles Hascoet paints Labubu in oil, giving a mass-produced toy the treatment of an old-master still life. Takashi Murakami has spent decades moving the same round-eyed characters between the museum and the gift shop. Will Cotton's landscapes are built from cake, candy and meringue. Annette Messager stitched dozens of small stuffed toys into a wall piece shaped like France. Cindy Sherman put her own face on pink porcelain and posed as Madame de Pompadour.
The Louvre-Lens is now bringing all of this together. So Cute! The Art of Happiness gathers more than 300 works, from Egyptian cat statues and Roman figures of babies to Jeff Koons, Murakami and Hascoet's Labubu, following the pull of cuteness from antiquity to the present.
Cuteness has always been good for selling things and for softening a message, and the show gives that its due, with contemporary work that puts a soft surface on hard subjects like violence and gender. That is the part that makes the exhibition more than a crowd-pleaser.
So Cute! The Art of Happiness on 23 September 2026, on view until 18 January 2027.
More info: louvrelens.fr
