What Fits in My Hand

Yesterday, CNN reported on a retrospective of Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara opening at the David Zwirner gallery in New York. Nara’s big-headed girls are now fixtures of visual culture, turning up on skateboards, T-shirts, tattoos. They look adorable. They also look furious, suspicious, and faintly threatening. Curator Mika Yoshitake describes their cuteness as »a camouflage for something that’s more guarded«.¹ But how, exactly, does that camouflage work?

»Nara’s big-headed girls are now fixtures of visual culture, turning up on skateboards, T-shirts, tattoos. They look adorable. They also look furious, suspicious, and faintly threatening«

Cuteness has acquired a substantial academic literature. Sianne Ngai’s 2012 Our Aesthetic Categories makes an unsettling claim: cute isn’t just an invitation to tenderness, it’s a power relation.² The cute object appears powerless, inviting us to squeeze it, handle it, possess it – affection and aggression turn out to be closer relatives than we’d like to think. Joshua Paul Dale and colleagues’ 2017 anthology The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, and Simon May’s 2019 The Power of Cute, both treat it as one of the defining aesthetic categories of our time.^{3 4}

What actually makes something cute? Several operations together. Miniaturisation brings an object within the scale of personal possession: English professor Susan Stewart’s On Longing describes how the miniature creates a world that can be held, surveyed, and mastered.⁵ Rounding and exaggerated proportions activate what ethologist Konrad Lorenz called Kindchenschema – the infantile proportions that release caregiving responses.⁶ Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould showed how Disney animators gradually enlarged Mickey Mouse’s head and eyes over five decades, with no formal policy, because audiences simply responded better.⁷

Repetition and raised pitch are two more ingredients. But a single ingredient doesn’t make something cute: hip hop relies on looping and repetition, small units built into extended structures, yet its low registers, hard transients, and aggressive delivery resist the rest. Chipmunk soul is the counterexample: in Kanye West’s 2003 song »Through the Wire«, a pitched-up Chaka Khan sample introduces the raised pitch of infant-directed speech⁸ – one operation switched on, without making the whole composition cute. The ingredients can be separated.

Singer-songwriter Cameron Winter, whom I’ve borrowed from once before for these essays, names the problem more precisely than any theorist. In »Try As I May«, he sings »To love what fits in my hand / I don’t.«⁹ The song is about failed intimacy, not aesthetics, but it captures the miniature’s paradox: something can fit in your hand without becoming yours to love.

Nara’s figures have the ingredients: big heads, round faces, exaggerated eyes. But their expressions resist what those ingredients are supposed to produce. They look back at us with suspicion, defiance, even outright hostility. The knife behind a girl’s back is almost beside the point. She may look small and vulnerable, but she certainly doesn’t look powerless. The machinery of cuteness is at work, but it never quite completes its job.

Hip hop’s failure is different: most of the operations never occur. In Nara, several do, but the final surrender is withheld – and that’s a significant refusal. Making something cute usually means demoting it: a mascot, a logo, a cartoon tank exist to turn something that might otherwise command you into something you’re permitted to handle. Nara’s girls accept everything up to that point, but never quite submit. The two failures reveal something that plain description misses: cute is not a property an object possesses, but an event completed by a particular combination of conditions, or left incomplete.

Architecture has its own version of this: Bernard Tschumi’s theory of disjunction treats space, movement, and event as elements that resist being brought into harmony.¹⁰ Philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s event has a similar elusive quality: always unfolding, never quite settling into something fixed.¹¹ Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s idea of the »uncanny« approaches the same threshold from the other side: something at once familiar and strange, where the two never quite resolve into one another.¹² Perhaps that’s Nara’s real duality: not cuteness interrupted by menace, but cute and uncanny circling the same unfinished threshold from opposite sides.

Nara’s girls hold the knife and never raise it. Winter’s hand closes around the thing and still can’t call it his. Neither is failing to arrive at cute, or at love – both are stopping exactly short of it, on purpose. Not arriving was the point all along.

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