School of Culture and Communication

This thesis examines the role of international auction houses in developing a Western market for Chinese Contemporary art from 1998 to 2012. It highlights six art auction events as pivotal for the transmission of cultural and economic value from local contexts to global acceptance. This thesis underscores the agency of collectors, networked art mediators and auctions to influence market expansion in the West, thereby revealing auctions as creators and consecrators of symbolic and economic value of Chinese Contemporary art.

This dissertation makes an argument for understanding Cute as a distinguishable aesthetic category whose emergence across the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is intimately related to visual and verbal discourses of idealised girlhood. It performs its thesis through employing Cute to aide analysis of contemporary art photographic representations of the Young-Girl. The project sits at the intersection of art history, gender studies, queer studies and girlhood studies, and offers an original and significant contribution to each. The dissertation is broadly split into two sections. The first is a delineation of Cute as aesthetic category. This section outlines both the history of Cute, its emergence and development, and the aesthetic, non-aesthetic and cultural properties of Cute, their role in defining and distinguishing Cute as aesthetic category. The second section considers what Cute as aesthetic does in contemporary art photography focussed on the body of the Young-Girl. Unfolding over three art photography series, each created by a single young woman artist, this analysis is categorised according to the culturally-specific manifestation of Cute and the Young-Girl represented. Tomoko Sawada’s ID400 (1998-2001) meditates on the relation of Cute (kawaii) and the Young-Girl (shōjo) in Japan. The relationship of the Young-Girl (girl) to Cute (cute) in the US is explored through Holly Andres’ The Fallen Fawn (2016). The transcultural aesthetic of Cute and its relationship to the social category of the Young-Girl is considered from the vantage of postcolonial settler-nation Australia through Tracey Moffatt’s Invocations (2000). The dissertation argues Cute exists as a dual aesthetic category – both in the realm of popular culture as everyday aesthetic, and in the realm of visual art as art aesthetic. In the realm of popular culture, Cute evidences an aestheticised deformity; a violent alteration inflicted on bodies to make them simultaneously more inferior along culturally-constituted lines of infantilisation and feminisation, and – because of this inferiority – more economically and emotionally valuable and desirable. In the realm of visual art, this aesthetic experience is elongated, extended, re-directed, and the affect of what would be an otherwise disturbing image becomes a pleasurable sensuous experience which nevertheless retains a recognition of both the deformity, and the processes that aestheticise it. The interplay between these two affective experiences – between Cute as everyday and art aesthetic – enables the possibility of Cute to stage a subversive cultural critique. Inherently interdisciplinary, located within the realm of sensuous experience and affect, and concerned with abstract representations of cultural relations of power, identity, sexuality and bodies, this dissertation draws its lineage of academic inquiry from no particular discipline, but rather from extended considerations of cultural phenomena such as Julia Kristeva’s Pouvoirs de l’horreur; Mikahil Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World; Roland Barthes’ Mythologies; Carol Mavor’s studies of fairytales, the colour blue, and boyhood, and; Guy Debord’s La societé du spectacle. Its contribution is the interpretation of Cute as contemporary cultural and aesthetic phenomena. It strives towards a treatise on the subject of Cute and the Young-Girl.

School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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