Disney, Art, and the Popular Mainstream

I really need to go through my blogs to find more of these posts for my thesis. You know, just because.

Anyway, I may have been sick to the point of not being able to move since Friday, but that has given my mind a lot of time to think. You'd be surprised how fast my mind was processing when I was suffering from a fever and what felt like sand paper against the channel that leads into my lungs. Currently, I'm on the final leg of recovery, but I'm giving myself until Tuesday before I do any big moving around outside of making my way to my bed and the computer.

To start this entry off, I'm going to post my comments about a video I found over on Jason's blog. I've been meaning to write some commentary about it for some time now, but never really got around to it because of my thesis. I bring it up now because I feel it is appropriate for the overall subject matter of this entry.



Now, this video was under the title "Claymation Animals Make Art-Ignorance Cute" on Jason's blog. I would not call this "art ignorance" so much as it is the common view of art by the mainstream. Given the last several hundred years or so, the actual definition of art has been given a very loose and broad range. This video, albeit edited heavily to get the most comedic commentary out of what possibly was a series of serious interviews, does a really good job of displaying this. You have people that don't see Christo's Gates in Central Park being art because they just looked like flags. At the same time, you have people that know what art is but don't understand why someone is walking around a gallery naked. There is no real common definition of what art is according to the mainstream. One person says it's art, another person says it's animal cruelty.

The only common ground that the popular mainstream has is that art is something that has to be first declared as art before it is questioned if it is in fact art. As exampled in the video, some people consider comic books art. That's declaring a genre of media is art. From there, you have people questioning said claim from all walks of life. Some of my professors early in my education even thought comic books were not art but merely an excuse for men to draw big breasted women. Well, that was before someone showed them Maus.

But these kind of swaying of opinion are really hard to pull off. Again, it isn't so much ignorance but a matter of opinion. If someone was truly ignorant about art, they would be like Peter Griffin in Family Guy who had no idea who someone as big as Leonardo Di Vinci is. (The punchline has him responding positively when the art mogul mentions Bazooka Joe.) Generally speaking, the definition of what is and isn't art is really based on the individual. Just because they don't know about the contemporary art scene or is willing to put any effort into looking into why someone used elephant dung in their portrait of the Virgin Mary doesn't make them any less ignorant than someone who does.

Frankly, when you boil down all the rhetoric and social research, the main broth consists of what people like and what people don't like. If they like something a lot, it's art! If they don't like it, it's crap!

Some three months ago, it was reported that Disneyland was closing down It's A Small World because the boats were getting stuck in the canal due to excess weight. It was later reported that not only will that change happen, but Disney decided to change the ride to include some 38 Disney characters in the various countries represented. With this change also came the addition of an America scene at the expense of cutting out, ironically, a portion of the Rain forest scene.

Well, needless to say there were a lot of community up-roar about this mess. Everything was said from how the inclusion of the characters takes away from the overall theme of the ride to how Disney is just trying to push plush dolls through ride tie-ins to even how the change won't really affect the overall ride experiences. People were called names, letters were written, the press was called at one point. You get the idea.

From my observation, the main core group of the upset part where using a lot of art terms that I secretly questioned if they knew what they mean. Now, I'll be the first to admit that Watkins needs a language class of some sort, because finding out the definitions of these "art terms" on my own proved daunting. But to see these words used by people whom I can only assume have not had the same art education I was something I didn't expect from a bunch of Disney Geeks like myself. The only thing I found that relates this subject to the one above is the fact that the people were on this march to ensure that Mary Blair, the original Imagineer and art designer of the bulk of the rides many scenes, artistic expression was being threaten by a commercial intent.

Now, I can't speak for Mary Blair or her family, but from this single statement came several tangents about artist intent in personal expression dating back to the High Renaissance. It got to the point where someone on the only Disney forum I go to now (I got banned from all the others for stating my opinion on several things, most of them very negative and critical towards the company, because the community running the sites saw Disney as this "can do no wrong" entity.) got their art history mixed up. I stepped it with what little art history I know, but enough to make my teacher proud for being able to say something that made logical sense.

And my knowledge was seen as being a display of my personal art ignorance. What did I say?

I simply pointed out that during the time that everyone claims artist expression was important (High Renaissance) that what was really going on was that artists were just doing their job. It dates back to the caveman era where they painted on walls for documentation of a great hunt, to Egyptian times where kings would tear down any representation of the former king so they create bigger and better representations of their own, to the High Renaissance where the Church hired artist to paint inspirational depictions of Biblical stories to teach the people who didn't know how to read, and up toward the Revolutionary Eras where The French Court had way too much money on their hands and nothing to spend it on other than essentially buying an artist to paint portraits of how cool they are because they have all this money. I pointed out that it was only in the last several hundred years where personal expression of the artist has been the forefront of art making.

They didn't care. And in retrospect, that information was completely off topic from what was bothering them even now. But the point still remains that the popular mainstream view of art is based on what little knowledge they know about art.

In their defence, the most art education any of them probably got is from public schooling. That kind of art education is all about names and dates and not really about concept, content, and context. If there is anything in those art classes that is about technique, it's level one stuff like what is a line verses what is a plane. So to them, the scenes from Small World are as artistic to them as a sculpture by Murakami is to me. And Murakami is the closest artist I can pull off the top of my head that is even remotely similar to Mary Blair's stuff!

Meanwhile, while this was all going on, it was reported and confirmed that Hong Kong Disneyland was going to open it's version of Small World with these changes already in place. They had their sneak preview run this past weekend, and video quickly hit YouTube.

If you can stomach the song, feel free to watch the video below.



I would find video of the original version to help you guys compare, but I've been also known to use the soundtrack to this ride as a form of slow torture when need be.

Anyway, as soon as this and other videos hit the web, the reaction from the Disney fans were kind of mixed. The people that hated it before seeing the video hate it even more now. The people that were neutral about it, like myself, no longer see what the big deal is. I have yet to find anyone that is absolutely fanatical about the addition of Disney characters in a ride that purists say is a celebration of global unity through the commonality of humanity and the hope it is said to bring. Kind of reminds me of that documentary about Maya Lin where there was this one guy that kept popping up saying he hated everything about the Vietnam Memorial both before and after it was installed. (My favorite shot is of him by himself at the alternative memorial they erected next to it smiling proudly as if he won the battle while there are people behind him crying over how moving Maya Lin's memorial is.)

The strange part? People are still throwing the definition of what is and isn't art around like it's a basketball. Some saying that the ride is art and shouldn't be changed because artworks don't change after they are made. (Boy, do I know how wrong that statement is first hand...) Others are saying that it isn't art, but a theme park ride that needs to be updated and made relevant to today's audience. More still are saying that while the design and concept of the ride is art, the ride itself isn't art and needs to be treated like a ride while the actual models of the ride be treated like art pieces.

My opinion? If the change makes sense, they should go ahead and do it. The changes to Small World don't make sense to me, but at the same time they are not that bad as people made them out to be. Still though, as a Disney Fan, I feel rather upset that this kind of thing has happened yet again. It happened when they took Figment out of Journey Into Imagination, added Jack Sparrow to the Pirates ride (which I was against from the start), and when Nemo moved into The Living Seas (which was a change I favored). Events like these, especially when they get this heated, convince me that there are people out there that are so afraid of change, their fear will not die until everything they hold dear to their hearts is vacuum-sealed like a limited-edition comic book in a museum archive vault.