The Disnification of Visual Art?

Paul Richard argues six reasons that Walt Disney should be included in the fine-art canon. He cites Disney's animist and anthropomorphic style and notes his surrealist imagery. Richard hails Disney's technological accomplishment, citing the Eadweard Muybridge–ian achievement that is animation, while also noting that Disney's studio practice resembled that of Thomas Eakins in at least one respect: To make Bambi, Disney obtained and vivisected a fresh deer carcass so that his artists could correctly portray deer anatomy. Then there is the fact of the artists he employed (his studio art school became the California Institute of the Arts) and collaborated with (Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Hart Benton, Frank Lloyd Wright). Disney was on the board of the Museum of Modern Art—clearly some important someones in the art world at the time considered him a colleague.

Richard then goes on to describe a number of artists he would like to see paired with Disney in a retrospective: Murakami, Koons, Crumb&mdahs;you know 'em, the usual (unusual?) suspects. My first thought was of an exhibition with an ear closer to the ground: I'd pair Disney's pink elephants and broom slaves with Ken Kagami, Michael Veliquette, and David Godbold. (All being artists I saw at Art Basel Miami Beach a couple years ago.)

But it occurs to me that rehabilitating Disney isn't about the imagery, it's about the identity. Richard is talking past his argument when he says that Disney's work sometimes falls flat, as that isn't one of the arguments against Disney. Those he doesn't confront, and they are: Orlando, family programming, Pixar, the commodification of Disney's work, the commodification of childhood, the ubiquity of Disney, the peerless promotion of the copyright regime by the Disney family, and so on. I rather appreciate that Richard doesn't bring up these points because I would like to believe that Richard is operating as Johanna Drucker argues in Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity that the art world has moved beyond a framework of oppositional politics that decides what is or isn't art. Then it's not a clever counterintuitive article, but a proposition worth evaluating.

And if that is the case my answer on Disney would ultimately be "no." Political context and other sorts of considerations that make the canon what it is may not any longer actually be useful to determine what is fine art. They still matter in deciding what goes in museums, though. To admit Disney would be to open up a massive new genealogy in visual art that includes all the things that are visual but aren't called art. So it wouldn't be Disney and Murakami or Disney and younger fine artists but Disney and the makers of Final Fantasy or Disney and the Coca Cola designers. That might all be defensible, but it would get very confusing very quickly.

Just because something is important does not make it visual art and at the end of the day, just because something is visual art does not mean that it is represents the most important visual thing. Rather this notion of visual art you find at museums offers a streamlined conversation within visual culture, one that (one hopes) influences and is influenced by other conversations in the broader culture. But museums cannot hope to archive all those other conversations, too.

A thoughtful piece by Richard and sadly, possibly his last for the Post; I understand that he will not be writing for them in the future.