by Jon Lackman | 28 September 2006 | Books, Contemporary, Museums
Over 100 artists have incorporated Disney imagery into their work. Why? Holly Crawford considers several possible motivations in her new book, “Attached to the Mouse: Disney and Contemporary Art” (she was kind enough to send us a complimentary copy), which aims to be “the first art history analyzing use of Disney imagery.” Among them: Disney art sells, it confounds high and low, it reveals the American character, it offers a window onto the artist’s childhood. (Crawford, incidentally, is an artist herself, and holds an M.A. in economics, a M.S.P.H in behavioral science, and a Ph.D. in art history.)
An exhibition currently at the Grand Palais, “Il était une fois Walt Disney: aux sources de l’art des studios Disney,” asks similar questions, and has generated controversy with its perceived bid to elevate Disney to high art. Charles Darwent in the Independent concludes that “When Andy Warhol turned out a series of Mickey Mouse paintings and prints in the early 1980s, he wasn’t flattering by imitation. He was asking Benjaminian questions about where cultural lines could be drawn in an age of mechanical reproduction. But Warhol’s assumption, like those of mouse-mocking artists from Eduardo Paolozzi to Jean-Michel Basquiat, may have been wrong. Disney’s art may not have been Low at all: in fact, Disney may have beaten them all to post modernism by marrying Richard Dadd to Jean Harlow in Pinocchio’s Blue Fairy, or in magicking Snow White’s Wicked Queen out of a Gothic statue in Naumburg Cathedral and the cheekbones of Joan Crawford. The boy from Marceline may have invented that most art-schooly of things, appropriation. If [curator] Girveau is right, then Warhol and the rest were unwittingly appropriating what had already been appropriated, trading in third-hand goods. It was Disney who was the artist.”
