Seriously Cute "The Renaissance of Cute"

Read this great interview about the rise of Cute in modern street art! Cuteness is everywhere! :)

“The Renaissance of Cute.” Thinking about this title, what was it, when did it die, when was it reborn, and what is it now?
Well there’s a bit of a con in that title that I hoped nobody would call me on. Renaissance, you’re quite right, implies the rebirth of something quite old. Cute as an aesthetic in Western art is actually not all that old. Let’s date it to—I’m not an art historian—but I’d say nineteenth century at the very latest. Certainly you can find images earlier that we’d recognize today as cute. But in terms of the exploitation of what we now think of as cute—let’s go with big eyes as its hallmark—that dates from the end part of the nineteenth century and takes off with Disney, in the first third of the twentieth century. My point is that cute got, almost from its birth, co-opted by the commercial world and therefore made impossible for serious art.

So it was dead to the art world?
It was dead to the art world, probably almost from its inception. The renaissance is the rebirth of it within what I take to be serious art, and by serious art I mean non-commercial.
Read the whole interview and see more links here