“Cute”

Is Cute the dull, uninspiring, insulting reply of the kitsch. Or is it the sincere, vulnerable, unpretentious reply of the intangible.

Words bubble up like Soda Pop | Animated Movie |

Somegoro Ichikawa, a reserved boy who expresses himself through haiku. Hana Sugisaki, a bubbly, timorous girl, who describes everything that touches her heart as cute.

During Year 2 I had taken a philosophy atelier class. One of the topics we had discussed was the usage of cute when describing an artwork.

Using the word cute to describe an artwork to the artwork’s artist is akin to blasphemy. It’s an insult. What are we supposed to do with cute? What does cute even mean?

Cute is relegated to an artwork’s instagramability. There is a certain disdain that comes with the term instagramable in relation to art and artists. Art was not made to be insta friendly, to be the next viral thing. It was not meant to elevate one’s status in society (this statement is a highly debatable/debated topic, I personally lean towards art having/is still being used as a prop, maybe for propaganda, maybe for inspiration). Art is a voice, it is a loud, heralding voice. It enamours, enchants, disgusts, maybe even makes you grieve. It is not cute.

There is also the other argument that cute defines the intellectual decline in terms of the current audience of the art world.

However, for the very first time, I wondered if cute was the word for the lexically inept. Or maybe even the word for the unpretentiously vulnerable.

Hana Sugisaki, in the movie, uses cute to describe anything and everything that touches her heart. There is no hierarchy of inanimate intimacy that is discernible because everything that touches her heart is termed cute. It can be poetry (haiku in this case), music, art, anything really. The way Hana says cute though, it makes an impact. For me personally, I could feel it, my mind being coloured with all the words she wanted to say but uses cute to define.

I wondered if the usage of cute when it comes art comes from the same place that Hana comes from. From a place of genuine sincerity, unpretentious vulnerability, even a childish desire to coalesce complex emotions into one complicatedly simple word, cute. I wonder if cute is the new all encompassing terminology for complicated emotions.

Well, one could look at it that way, or consider it the disdainful decline of the art audience. I look at it as both, perhaps for the very first time.

Tell me what you guys think down in the comments!