The power of the cuqui: how infantile aesthetics conquered the planet

• QUICO ALSEDO

  @quicoalsedo

  Madrid

Friday, December 6, 2019 - 02:02

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• 'The power of the cuqui'. Read a preview of Simon May's book
• Anti-self-help philosophy. Death to the cuckoo, comes Puterful's malrollism

Let's talk clearly: even if you don't know, you're cuqui. Yes, you read correctly: cuqui. At least a little. Do not hide. Respond to the cuquitest : Do you shrap hearted emoticons stuffed with hearts to your close friends (and even acquaintances)? Has breakfast gone from rough coffee to a coffee with a heart made with cream on top and from there to an ominous bowl of cereals? Look around: do pastel shades, flamingo prints, avocado like cuqui parsley from all quinoa salads proliferate?

Tell the truth, for whatever you want: does Hello Kitty dominate your life? Do you miss ET's freak extraterrestrial goodness, not the movie but the person ? Repeatedly repeat the expressions "how cute" or "how cute"? Do you live surrounded by cheap self-help phrases? Have you taken any photo of those cell phones getting morrito and cat ears? Do you occasionally surprise yourself unexpectedly thinking about Pikachu?

Sees it? Cuqui, more than cuqui. Please release that cup of Mr. Wonderful with the caption "Never stop dreaming."

But here comes the good news (for you): the cuqui dominates (a little at least) the world. I cuqui it like tenderness. As helplessness As a cool vulnerability. As adult infantilism. As aesthetic, and sometimes vital, piterpanism . As epitome of the innocent and partly heir to the kitsch . As silly, deep down, with more content than it seems. Because cuqui, eye, can also have a dark, dark, malevolent, even monstrous reverse.

Such a cuquiafirmation comes from a whole professor of Philosophy at King's College in London, who has dedicated several years of research to the subject, looking for all the edges. The man is called Simon May and here is his thesis, in his words: «Yes, the sweet and helpless generates feelings of protection, but that is then distorted towards the spectrum of the strange. It becomes something darker, indeterminate and hurt ».

Already, but May, why is it important to study the phenomenon? “It's a good question: in times of so much injustice, hate and intolerance, it seems perverse to focus on Pokémon, right? But it is that international fashion for tenderness is related to our time in at least three ways. And he lists them: “First of all, we want to escape from a world so threatening to a garden of innocence and peace . Second, the cuqui expresses the tendency of our time to abandon the opposites: male / female, child / adult, good / bad, even human / animal. Hello Kitty and ET are gender, age and indeterminate species, pure ambiguity. Or how Jeff Koons' balloon dog, which seems both helpless, menacing and helpless, depends on how you see it.

The success of tenderness is related to the desire to escape from a world ruled only by power

Finally, and thirdly, in relation to what the cuqui tells us about ourselves, May introduces the concept of fullness into the theory of power. To assign qualities less than subversive: «I believe that the success of tenderness is related to the desire to escape from a world ruled only by power . Cute objects, being this vulnerable, are in some sense an anti-power.

Translated to the Christian: the victory at least positional and by crushing the weakness seeks to question the traditional, hard, insensitive, somewhat stolid power.

The cuqui, or the cute, or the cute , in its Anglo-Saxon sense, would therefore come to give us a break in these times of anger, narrowness and fear, and to doubt the old order and command of the old regime, May theorizes in his book , The power of the cuqui , that publishes now in Spain the publishing house Alpha Decay.

All that would be the cuqui, the "rococo of the poor", as he calls it, intervening thunderously in the debate, Eloy Fernández Porta , professor of Theories of Culture and Contemporary Art of the Pompeu Fabra University, and one of the last most heterodox corrosive of Spanish thought.

«The cuqui can be understood in several ways. From the point of view of aesthetics, it is the rococo style of the poor. From the psychological point of view, it is the result of a childhood regression. From the moral it is a free hedonism, without substance and without claim of the body », stoned directly to Cuquismo Fernández Porta.

From the point of view of aesthetics, what is the rococo style of the poor

So far the one of lime. Now, the one of sand, valuing the anti-cuqui reaction of so many citizens impaled with such cuquiavalancha of cuquiterrones de cuquiazúcar (do you see how tired?): «The reason why the cuqui is so squeaky and problematic», says Fernández Porta, "Is that it is a style of happiness, an irreflexive and easy happiness, and that fits badly with an artistic tradition that values ​​drama and pain," he theorizes, recalling the historical cultural superiority of evil over good.

Fernández Porta ends up coming together in some way with May by granting the cuqui, the cute or as demons a distinctive value as the spirit of the times, the zeitgeist and such: «Like all stylistic forms that try to represent happiness, it is neglected by his contemporaries and will be appreciated in the future, when bad taste is perceived as a response to the formal codes of the time, and not as an aesthetic error.

I cuqui it, then, as a perhaps generational reaction to the pre-millennial world : to its aesthetic, moral, almost ontological codes. I cut him as a pedrereta to the father, as a raised finger of the new generation asking for a little house.

And what do the business people exploit anticuquism in all its aspects think about the roll, to sell us from agendas decorated with children's lyrics that we will never use to candles with pasty smells that seek to suffocate us based on cinnamon, incense and hugs?

«Is that beware of eating the world, then you have to screw it up», Alejandro Oneto and Diego Villalba laugh. They, two thirty-year-old gaditans dedicated to audiovisuals, saw the market niche clearly in 2016, when «Mr. Wonderful's success was such that many people in the networks complained of so much cursilería, and about 20 brands came out copying his style» .

In a skillful move they decided to take the opposite direction and exploit the answer to both the announcement of compresses turned into a vital guide, and created Mr. Puterful, who sells the same aesthetic viscosity, the same pastel pink agendas and unicorn-shaped cups ( cuqui totem where there are them), but with slogans like "I don't have the chichi pa 'lanterns" -or umbrellas of umbrellas- .

"A lot of people are tired of good rolling and we give them reality," says Diego. "The idea," Alejandro concludes, "is to use the same cuckoo designs so fashionable and that people see them from afar, but when they approach the phrase, they hit them."

The cuqui creates a parallel reality by selling you that 'you can get everything you set your mind to.' No you can't get it

Their business, they explain, is that of the so-called happy quotes , the "happy phrases" good-natured that "seem to help you, but in reality they can sink you," they explain, in their closest approach to the thesis of May and Fernández Porta: « The cuqui can be a huge deception, because it creates a parallel reality by selling you that 'you can get everything you set your mind to.' No, you can't get it, and lying that it can lead people to frustration, and that's a whore.

May's book aims, in short, to erect a cultural aleph about the cuqui in the manner of the Notes on the camp by Susan Sontag (1964). This is: the mono as a critique of capitalism, as "expression of consumerism, of the constantly changing fashion product that is mass produced and mercilessly exploited for profit." The comeflores as a vehicle of the "ironic detachment of the times, and at the same time of a certain joy" to face our contemporary dramas.

Cuqui infantilism as a symptom of a certain reversal of roles in fatherhood, perhaps one of the most accurate and irrefutable shots of the King's College professor: «It is a trend that began in the nineteenth century, children have become parents of their own parents, "he says, and abounds:" The role has been completely reversed, and it even seems that the cult of love for the child has replaced the cult of romantic love, childhood is a new sacred space. "

California and Japan are the epicenters of this rebellion of innocence, of the achuchable, this exegete of the sweet tells. And he walks with a murderous look especially in the Asian country, home to the same perversions of all jaez, that of the cliché lyricism of a Murakami. A country whose president frequently appears next to a teddy bear, a symbol of strength: «Tenderness in Japan is called kawaii , which also means escapism. What do they escape? Of such a hierarchical and organized society. And from its history: since its defeat against the United States in World War II, the country furiously avoids any explicit manifestation of power. Hence not only the manga ... You could say that Japan is the first country to present itself as a cuqui nation , even with beautiful images in its military vehicles, such as its attack helicopters.

May also does not forget the dark reversal of the phenomenon, something on the other side usual of cultural approaches to childhood: many legends exploited by Disney are actually bloody tales, full of death and destruction. “On the one hand there is deprivation: many of these cuckoo objects are like amputees, they have no mouth, no fingers, no eyes sometimes. So much helplessness, in fact, can awaken sadistic instincts too, ”he postulates.

And in the background, another of the signs of the times: the ego. «Cuqui also symbolizes fast personal satisfaction, our thirst for always new products, but that doesn't make us more selfish. In fact, social psychologists Gary Sherman and Jonathan Haidt say that tenderness is a moral emotion, and that it helps us expand our emotional empathy and our circle of moral concern.

Take the reader, then again Mr. Wonderful's cup. Keep calm and smile at life, which can be wonderful. Or not.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project