In the 1958 hit song “Sugartime,” to which Barthes was referring, the sunny, smiling McGuire Sisters harmonize sweetly, filling their mouths with honey: “Sugar in the mornin’ / Sugar in the evenin’ / Sugar at suppertime / Be my little sugar / And love me all the time.”Īnd like anything pleasurable, sugar is often characterized as a vice.
“A spoonful of sugar,” as Mary Poppins croons, is a bribe, something to help “the medicine go down.” Sugar is leisure and celebration - what British birthday would be complete without the stickiness of cake frosting on fingers? It is, according to Roland Barthes, an attitude - as integral to the concept of Americanness as wine is to Frenchness. Cool stuff can be “sweet, man.” Our crush is a sweetheart, and our sweetheart might be our honey. When children are good and happy, they are cutie pies. Sugar is sprinkled everywhere in our language. The uncomfortable excess of Cotton’s work was used to sell uncomfortable excess. When the painting made its debut on the cover of Perry’s 2010 album Teenage Dream, it sat somewhere between commercial pop and high-art comment on all of the above. Perry offers a look both languid and post-orgasmic, lips parted, her hair nostalgically curled like a 1950s pinup. The landscape bulges and billows with emphatic softness, dominating the painting except for a hint of blue sky.
In a romantic oil painting by Will Cotton, Katy Perry lies naked on a cotton candy cloud, a whisper of pink spun sugar draped over her butt.
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