I was flipping through the gallery that accompanies this Times article on the whimsical trend in public art, when I came across a sculpture that I'd seen the last time I was in New York of Miffy, the irresistible children's-story rabbit created by Dutch artist Dick Bruna. As a child, a family friend gave me a Miffy stuffed animal, named Nijntje, so I'm something of a partisan. But I'm not alone. In his small rabbit, Bruna seemed to have cracked some sort of mysterious international code for cute, to the extent that I came across this, clearly bootlegged, image during a long walk in Shanghai last year:
I really do love how exceedingly simple graphic design can get lodged somewhere in our brains, or perhaps more accurately, can hit at something that was already there. Hello Kitty may have a wider following, and Bruna himself believes that she's a ripoff of Miffy. But Miffy was there first. And because, while she's popular, Miffy doesn't have quite the obsessive brand power that Hello Kitty does, she's free to pop up everywhere, to represent cuteness and approachability in a huge array of circumstances--and to a large number of ends, commercial and otherwise.