Clumsy kittens, pigs in costumes and glittery unicorns: how the cult of cute took hold

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Every day I rise early, like a stock trader, to start the daily business of sending and receiving adorable videos. Pigs wearing pig costumes, alien creatures spanking each other’s botties, relationship dynamics explored via gibberish, talking cats and noodly cartoons. My friends and I are in deep, but how did this happen? “Cuteness has been slowly taking over our world,” says Claire Catterall, curator of the Cute exhibition at London’s Somerset House. “It’s now accepted as one of our languages.” It’s a language that wouldn’t exist without the internet. Even in 2014, Tim Berners-Lee expressed surprise at how his invention...