Somerset House has announced CUTE: The Irresistible Rise of Cuteness in Contemporary Culture, a major exhibition running from 25 January to 14 April 2024 in its Embankment Galleries South Wing. Curated by senior curator Claire Catterall, it is the first landmark show to interrogate cuteness not as a trivial aesthetic but as a cultural force with neurological roots and political teeth. Tickets are priced at £18.50, with concessions from £11, and timed-entry booking is required. The exhibition is presented in partnership with Sanrio, marking Hello Kitty’s 50th anniversary.
The show spans over 50 artists across six thematic clusters – Crybaby, Play Together, Monstrous Other, Sugar-Coated Pill, Hypersonic, and a games arcade – moving from the sentimental to the subversive. Louis Wain’s anthropomorphic cat paintings and Harry Pointer’s Victorian postcards of costumed cats from the 1870s anchor the modern kawaii explosion in a longer British visual tradition. Yumeji Takehisa’s prewar Japanese illustrations lead the timeline into Hello Kitty’s 1974 debut and a Hello Kitty disco designed with Sanrio. The Coffee Shop by ARTBOX operates independently of ticketed entry.
Contemporary commissions dominate the gallery walls. Aya Takano’s floating, wide-eyed figures channel the Shibuya-kei lineage. Mike Kelley’s plush-toy installations – previously shown at Tate Modern – interrogate the line between comfort and abjection. Nayland Blake’s The Little One (1994) pairs innocence with unease. Hannah Diamond’s sonic, hyper-pink music installation occupies the Hypersonic zone. Rachel Maclean’s !step on no petS Step on no pets! (2021) deploys saccharine imagery to expose digital surveillance anxieties. Juliana Huxtable’s hybrid portraits – lizard eyes, pig snouts – explore identity beyond the human/animal binary. Sean-Kierre Lyons’s gargoyle sculptures, drawing on 1990s cartoon animation and minstrelsy roots, examine how racial caricature and cuteness mirror each other across history.
The psychology underpinning the exhibition is not decorative. Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz formalised Kindchenschema – the baby schema – in 1943: a round face, large eyes, small nose and mouth, a protruding forehead, and stubby extremities trigger an innate caregiving response. A 2009 fMRI study published in PNAS by Melanie Glocker and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania demonstrated that high baby-schema infant faces activate the nucleus accumbens, a key structure of the mesocorticolimbic reward system, in nulliparous women. The activation mirrors patterns seen in appetitive motivation, suggesting cuteness is not a soft emotion but a neurobiological imperative driving parental investment regardless of kinship.
Hiroshi Nittono at Osaka University has since broadened the framework. His 2012 PLoS ONE study found that viewing cute images – not necessarily baby-schema faces – improves attentional focus and promotes careful motor behaviour. Participants who saw puppies, kittens, or round-featured characters performed better on precision tasks than controls. Nittono’s two-layer model of kawaii argues that the emotion extends well beyond biological baby cues: cultural objects, character goods, and even tactile interaction with plush materials can activate it. A 2022 study from the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute in Kyoto demonstrated that when a robot presenter physically touched an object with deliberate, lingering gestures, observers rated both the object and the presenter as more kawaii – suggesting that cuteness is socially contagious and behaviourally constructed, not merely visually fixed.
Cultural scholarship fills the remaining gap. Joshua Paul Dale, founder of the academic field of Cute Studies at Chuo University in Tokyo and author of Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired Our Brains and Conquered the World (Profile Books, 2023), positions kawaii as a mechanism of “affective capitalism” in which emotional responses are systematically monetised. The Japanese kawaii aesthetic – from Sanrio mascots to municipal tax office mascots to self-deprecating student handwriting – functions as social lubricant and corporate branding strategy simultaneously. In the West, Hello Kitty’s adoption by the Riot Grrrl movement in the 1990s, worn as ironic hair clips and handbags, demonstrates how cuteness can be weaponised against the very femininity it appears to encode. Catterall frames the exhibition’s thesis directly: cute is “a Trojan Horse” that “thrives within the neoliberal capitalist structures that spawned it, while at the same time undermining its very foundations.”
The Monstrous Other section confronts cuteness’s darker register. Robotic pets designed for elder care in Japan, Gothic Lolita fashion from Harajuku, and Cosima von Bonin’s Killer Whale with Long Eyelashes all occupy the uncanny space where adorable tips into menacing. The exhibition holds this tension open. The Sugar-Coated Pill zone examines how cuteness softens the unpalatable, from pharmaceutical branding to political campaigning. The Crybaby section explores cuteness’s capacity to produce collective emotional release.
The Play Together zone foregrounds communal experience: a games arcade designed for all ages, and the Hello Kitty disco. The Evening Standard awarded five stars, calling it “a must-visit for any adult child of the internet age.” Time Out praised its exploration of “an all-consuming cultural phenomenon,” and The Guardian highlighted its “thoughtful exploration of the cult and culture of cuteness.”
What the exhibition demonstrates, across 81 days and three months of programming, is that cuteness operates simultaneously as evolutionary trigger, commercial strategy, subcultural resistance, and emotional regulation technology. Its neuroscience is real – the nucleus accumbens lights up, attentional focus sharpens, prosocial behaviour increases. Its cultural politics are complex – Harajuku teenagers and Riot Grrrl feminists deploy Hello Kitty against different orthodoxies. Its economic logic is pervasive – Sanrio’s global licensing empire, built on a character with no mouth, generates over £6 billion annually. Somerset House has assembled the evidence. The conclusion is not that cuteness is harmless fun, but that it is, as Lorenz suspected in 1943, irrepressible.
CUTE: The Irresistible Rise of Cuteness in Contemporary Culture runs at Somerset House, Embankment Galleries South Wing, 25 January – 14 April 2024. Tickets: £18.50 / concessions from £11. Book at somersethouse.org.uk.
For more on the psychology behind cultural phenomena, read our analysis of why nostalgia drives contemporary design trends. For Hello Kitty’s half-century evolution, see Hello Kitty at 50: how a character with no mouth became a global brand.
