The Serious Business of Being Cute

“Kittens,” said Tim Berners-Lee.

He had been asked what had surprised him most about the evolution of the internet. It was 2014, and he was referring to the cat videos that had racked up billions of views in the quarter-century since he invented the World Wide Web.

But the internet did not invent our obsession with cats. Look back another hundred years and the pioneers of cinema were already putting feline stars on screen.

From the Lumière brothers’ 1899 short La Petite Fille et Son Chat to Pajamas and Nick Drake, one of the earliest videos uploaded to YouTube, the cat meme has proved remarkably durable. Posted by co-founder Steve Chen in 2005, the video shows his pet playing with a rope to the sound of Hazey Jane II.

The Berners-Lee anecdote is highlighted in an exhibition opening at the Louvre-Lens later this month, Trop mignon! L'art du bonheur (So Cute! The Art of Happiness). Bringing together some 200 works and objects spanning more than three millennia, the exhibition (opening 23 September) asks why certain images and forms prompt such immediate feelings of affection, tenderness or protectiveness – and what might lie behind them.

Martin Claude MONOT, Enfant jouant avec son pied (portrait présumé du fils de l'architecte Antoine-Joseph de Bourge), 1779, plâtre, Paris,

musée du Louvre, département des Sculptures © GrandPalaisRmn (musée du Louvre) / René-Gabriel Ojeda

Its historical sweep begins with ancient representations of animals and infants, moving through putti, miniatures and sentimental portraits, the eighteenth-century emergence of pink, depictions of domestic pets and the consoling presence of dolls and soft toys. These are placed in dialogue with the global rise of Japanese kawaii culture and contemporary artists including Jeff Koons, Annette Messager, Cindy Sherman, Pierre et Gilles and Agnès Varda, whose work unsettles the conventions of so-called cuteness.

The exhibition opens with what curators Annabelle Ténèze and Émilie Girard describe as a “visual collision” – objects from widely separated periods are brought together around Philippe Katerine’s large pink sculpture Monsieur Rose – Selfie.

Rather than proceeding as a strictly chronological history, the show moves through a succession of emotional and imaginary worlds, shifting between fine art, archaeology, commercial imagery and everyday objects. Around its midpoint, a multisensory ‘Symphony of Emotions’ invites visitors to consider their own physical and psychological responses to what they see. The dreamlike, sometimes game-like scenography culminates in a final section of glittering surfaces and saturated colour.

For all its deliberate accessibility, however, So Cute! is not a celebration. It also explores the possessiveness, aggression or imbalance of power that cuteness can conceal: the vulnerable object may be cherished, consumed or infantilised, while cuteness itself can be used to manipulate. In tracing those contradictions back through art history, the exhibition proposes that cuteness is neither a recent fad nor an inconsequential matter of taste, but a revealing measure of how humans respond to weakness and intimacy.

It is also an exhibition that is serious about pleasure. “The history of art deals extensively with tragedy and darkness, but tends to overlook happiness, simple joy and tenderness. Yet these are all part of the human experience,” write Ténèze, director of the Louvre-Lens, and Girard, director of the museums of the city of Strasbourg, in answer to questions put to them by The Art Journal.

Although cuteness has become the subject of serious academic study in the past 15 years, it remains largely overlooked by museums, they say.

Charles Hascoët (né à Paris en 1985), Labubu #1, 2025, huile sur toile, H. 35 ; l. 30 cm Avec l’aimable autorisation de Danysz (Paris), © Adagp, Paris, 2026 © photographie galerie Danysz

“When you look at museum collections, you realise that tenderness is everywhere: flowers, animals, babies,” the curators write. “It forms part of a visual unconscious that we do not always notice.”

They assert the importance of emotions in museums, arguing that our responses to artworks inform how we understand them. In this context, the objects in the exhibition provide an opportunity “to examine what the ‘cute’ reveals about our way of being in the world.”

Their approach rests on two ideas: that “serious matters can be approached with a playful touch” and that “seemingly light-hearted subjects may be deeper than they appear and provide food for thought.” It is an argument that recalls Susan Sontag’s treatment of another supposedly frivolous aesthetic category in her 1964 essay ‘Notes on Camp’.

The exhibition also highlights how certain emotions and subjects have traditionally been excluded from museums because they appear trivial, sentimental or childish. “Our approach has sought to avoid a simplistic or superficial treatment of the subject,” say Ténèze and Girard. “Cuteness makes us feel good. It comforts us, but it can be a deceptive refuge. It can serve as a strategy for self-assertion, harbour a certain melancholy or conceal a form of political danger.”

For the curators, taking cuteness seriously means encouraging visitors to look beyond their immediate emotional responses and consider what those responses might reveal.

“The exhibition helps visitors to learn how to interpret images, train their eyes and develop a critical mindset. ‘Why am I drawn to this image?’ ‘What need for comfort is it expressing?’ ‘Is it a trap?’”