An exploration of cuteness and its immense hang on all of us, from emojis and fluffy pups to its more uncanny, subversive expressions

Cuteness offers taken the earth by storm. Global feelings Hello Kitty and Pokémon, the functions of artists Takashi Murakami and Jeff Koons, Heidi the cross-eyed opossum and E.T.-most reflect its gathering power. But what does “adorable” mean, like a sensibility and design? Exactly why is it so pervasive? Is it all infantile fluff, or will there be something even more uncanny and even menacing about THE ENERGY of Cute going on-in a lighthearted method? In The Power of Cute, Simon Might provides nuanced and surprising answers.

We usually start to see the adorable as merely diminutive, harmless, and helpless. May challenges this prevailing perspective, looking into everything from Mickey Mouse to Kim Jong-il to claim that cuteness isn’t limited to such sweet characteristics but also beguiles us by changing or distorting them into something of playfully indeterminate power, gender, age, morality, as well as varieties. May grapples with cuteness’s dark and unpindownable side-unnerving, artful, understanding, apprehensive-elements which have fascinated since historic instances through mythical statistics, especially hybrids just like the hermaphrodite as well as the sphinx. He argues that cuteness can be an addictive antidote to today’s pressured targets of knowing our purpose, becoming in charge, and appearing predictable, clear, and sincere. Rather, it frivolously expresses the doubt these norms deny: the ineliminable doubt of who we are; of how much we are able to control and know; of who, in our relationships with others, really has power; indeed, of the very value and purpose of power.

THE ENERGY of Cute delves right into a phenomenon that speaks with strange force to your age.