Includes bibliographical references (pages 232-235) and index.

Theses on cuteness. Fifteen theses on the cute, 2001 / Frances Richard -- Cuteness, 1991 / John Morreall -- Cuteness and commodity aesthetics, 1996 / Lori Merish -- Cuteness, 2001 / Daniel Harris -- The cuteness of the avant-garde, 2012 / Sianne Ngai -- On cutism : Allen Ruppersberg, 1992 / Peter Schjeldahl -- Para- and proto-cuteness. A biological homage to Mickey Mouse, 2008 / Stephen Jay Gould -- Anatomy of disgust, 1998 / William Ian Miller -- 'Adorable!', compassion, and tenderness, 1978 / Roland Barthes -- On cosiness, or making a scene, 2019 / Elizabeth Honor Wilder -- Naive nouveau and its malcontents, 1980 / Carrie Rickey -- On naive and sentimental poetry, 1796 / Friedrich Schiller -- On the 'naive': In conversation with Jason Havneraas and Kristian Skylstad, 2015 / Goutam Ghosh -- A note on camp ridiculousness, 2020 / Juliane Rebentisch -- A brief account of the child-cult, 1927 / Wyndham Lewis -- Social differentiation and belonging. Relishing the minor: Juliana Huxtable's kewt aesthetic, 2015 / Adrienne Edwards -- Sex, or the unbearable, 2017 / Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman -- The art of cute little things: Nara Yoshitomo's parapolitics, 2010 / Marilyn Ivy -- Seeing disability: Visual rhetorics of disability in popular photography, 2001 / Rosemarie Garland-Thomson -- Warhol and queer childhood, 1996 / Michael Moon -- Cute but deadly: Women and violence in Japaneses comics, 1999 / Kanako Shiokawa -- Cuties in Japan, 1995 / Sharon Kinsella -- Feline darlings and the anti-cute, 2015 / Sasha Archibald -- Triangular trade: Colouring, remarking, and narrative in the writings of Kara Walker, 2007 / Kevin Young -- Oral history: Interview with Alex Fialho, 2016 / Nayland Blake -- The machine and the commodity. Mika Rottenberg's productive bodies, 2010 / Hsuan L. Hsu -- In conversation with Julia Bryan-Wilson, 2019 / Mika Rottenberg -- Dean Kenning's kinetics, 2019 / John Roberts -- Cute futures: Mariko Mori's techno-enlightenment, 1998 / Norman Bryson -- The desire to desire, 1987 / Mary Ann Doane -- Toy shop, 1974 / Theodor Adorno -- The ice cream social, 2004 / David Robbins -- The artwork of children's labour, 2019 / Leigh Claire La Berge -- Our endless cutemporary. Introduction to difficulty, 2013 / Jennifer Doyle -- The quiet revolution of animal crossing, 2020 / Ian Bogost -- Cut to cute: In conversation with Johanna Gosse, 2018 / Peggy Ahwesh -- In the image of man, 1991 / Mike Kelley -- Charlemagne Palestine: Teddy bears to the rescue, 2018 / Christopher Knight -- Annette Messager, 2000 / Catherine Grenier -- Remarks that not only have nothing to do with the expanded concept of handicrafts..., 2011 / Friedrich Wolfram Heubach -- The charming, disgusting paintings of Tala Madani, 2017 / Negar Azimi -- When awe turns to awww..., 2017 / Elizabeth Legge -- Disaster aesthetics: How COVID-19 made the world 'cute' , 2020 / Lewis Gordon -- Seriously cute: Six artists harnessing the power of dichotomy of cuteness, 2020 / Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy.
Writers include Sasha Archibald, Roland Barthes, Leigh Claire La Berge, Lauren Berlant, Ian Bogost, Jennifer Doyle, Lee Edelman, Adrienne Edwards, Lewis Gordon, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Stephen Jay Gould, Lori Merish, John Morreall, Juliane Rebentisch, Frances Richard, Carrie Rickey, Friedrich Schiller, Peter Schjeldahl, Kanako Shiokawa, Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, Kevin Young.

'The Cute' tracks the astonishing impact of a single aesthetic category on post-war and contemporary art, and on the vast range of cultural practices and discourses on which artists draw. From robots and cat videos to ice cream socials, 'The Cute' explores the ramifications of an aesthetic 'of' or 'about' minorness - or what is perceived to be diminutive, subordinate, and above all, unthreatening - on the shifting forms and contents of art today. This anthology shows how contemporary artists have worked on and transformed the cute, and in ways that not only complexify its meaning, but reshape their own artistic practices.