toon characters in cartoon colours. Sad cute. Silly cute. Sexy cute. Helpless. Playful. Innocent. Bambi goes downtown. Twentieth-century artists turned on beauty for noble reasons, initially to avoid producing art for the pleasure of a society they held responsible for World War I. But increasingly, art’s main quarrel with beauty was over money. Expelled from high art, beauty and its companions found a home in popular art, in advertising, music, magazines, and movies. For serious artists, the beautiful became associated with the commercial, and therefore was to be avoided or attacked. That went double for the cute, anathema to art because of a By Nick Mount wobbly fawn and a big-eared mouse. Art didn’t have a problem with selling Pollocks to the few for millions, but it did have a problem with selling Disneys to the many for the price of a movie.
Many street artists began with graffiti, and many continue to use its spray can while adding posters, stickers, and sculpture. They’re still mostly young, for the obvious reasons that the work is usually illegal, potentially dangerous, and doesn’t pay. Graffiti’s political voice has expanded in street art, becoming less about the self and more about the world. It’s typically anti-corporate, though seldom overtly. Street art shares the sheets with culture jammers like Adbusters magazine, but it’s more hopeful than critical. Oddly, the single most common aesthetic in street art, this child of shock, of defiant tags and disfigured letters, is cuteness. From São Paolo to San Francisco, Tokyo to Toronto, New York to New Orleans, the cute pokes its head through the tangled Duchamps of urban walls. Smiley faces. Pouting faces. Big eyes in big heads. Car-
24 TWIST
Street art’s genius is to retake the tremendous power of aesthetics surrendered by art to commerce, while dodging the commercial by giving itself away. Street art is no more immune to commerce than graffiti turned out to be. The art dealers and shoemakers have come calling even faster than they did in the 1980s. But what they’re buying isn’t street art; it’s pale copies or other work. Street art is on the street. That’s why Banksy called Sotheby’s buyers morons, because they paid tens of thousands for copies when the originals sat outside for free. There, in her original frame, the little girl and her lost balloon are not for sale. Around the mid-1990s, street art became less about the idea and more about the art, more playful than conceptual. On the streets, shock lost its shock. Pleasure took its turn: the pleasures of making and seeing art for what it is, not for what it says, or what it costs. Pleasures art forgot. Indoors, cute is queen in Lowbrow art, sometimes known as Pop Surrealism, which took off about the same time street art got cute, and is influenced by graf-