book Attached to the Mouse, Disney & Art

Holly Crawford

Attached to the Mouse

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New book

Now available

Roman & Littefield

Published by Roman & Littlefield,(imprint UPA). Available now. Barnes and Noble, Amazon and many others.

Also available at libraries worldwide. Check Worldcat.

How Disney, a mass media corporation influences contemporary art. How and why have so many artist used the Mouse and other Disney copyrighted images in their work? Why some are not the 'bad' boys we thought they were. Disney and the artists both argue that they hold the copyright? How was this resolved? Or was it? Some surprising answers and a new history of Pop Art.

There are links to many of the artists' images who have used Mickey Mouse in their art.

Artists' images--links

Catalogue essay "Disney and Pop Art," for the catalogue Once Upon a Time Disney (1937-1967). The exhibition will open at the Grand Palais in Paris September 15, 2006. Then it travels to The Fine Art Museum in Montreal. It open there in March 8, 2007.

Review and interview, Sarah Bayliss, "How Sleeping Beauty Got Here Castle," Artnews, December 2006, page 35. This review is the exhibition.

I have an 8 page essay on Pop artists and Disney

Curated by Bruno Girveau

Jonathan Lethem,"The Ecstasy of Influence. A Plagarism," Harpers, February 2007. Comment on Attached to the Mouse in his article.

Jonathan Lethem's article

Review:"Exploding Pop Art Myths," by Lisa Paul Streitfeld, NY Arts magazine, Jan-Feb 2007

Strietfeld review

Reviews:

"In her innovative book Attached to the Mouse Holly Crawford examines the appropriation of the iconic images of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck with thoughtful scholarship and spirited humor."--Peter Selz, Professor Emeritus, History of Art, UC Berkeley.

"Enjoyable, brilliant, readable, and enormously informative. The seminal study of how mass media institution "Disney and Art" function in our culture, written with flashes of humour. It's likely to be a premier resource for years to come." --Professor Manuel Alvarado, Arts & Media, City University, London, UK

"For at least a half-century Mickey Mouse, ears and all, has served as one of the most potent icons in contemporary visual culture. The poster boy for everything from cinematic innovation to American cultural 'imperialism,' the animated rodent is freighted with a veritable encyclopedia of inference. Not surprisingly, artists the world over -- and especially Mickey's countrymen and -women -- have fixated on the simply, distinctively drawn figure. But however much that (deceptively) ingenuous face and unique silhouette turn up in Pop paintings, social-commentary cartoons, and even abstract sculpture, writers and historians have let Mickey's ubiquity pass without substantial comment. Until now. Defying the perils of post-modernist close reading, pop-culture fetishism, and the fabled wrath of Disney Corp., Holly Crawford proffers an exhaustive documentation, classification, and analysis of Mickey's many appearances in the visual art of our time. Her study fills a gap in the critical history of recent art, not to mention in Mouseology." --Peter Frank, Critic and Curator

Abstract

Disney used new technology to create a new art form, animated cartoons, in the 1930s, and, via mass media, to elevate the anthropomorphized cartoon animals epitomized by Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to celebrity status. He originally produced an optimistic feisty underdog mouse and berserk duck, along with an abundance of objects for an emerging consumer economy. In the 1950s, using the new technology of television to screen the Mickey Mouse Club and the opening of Disneyland, Disney established the Mouse as an icon of corporate success and American culture. Disneyland, and later Disney World, was praised by architects as a possible vision of a better future. The resurgence of the Mouse in the mid-1950s induced Pop artists to appropriate his image, importing his humorous connotations, and nostalgically depicting the feisty, underdog Mouse of their childhood rather than the emerging images produced for Disneyland and the Mickey Mouse Club. Their work reflected their attachment, and found acceptance with viewers and buyers for the same reason. Referencing globally popular cartoon figures while expressing nuanced differences from Disney proved to be a career gambit that assisted the success of these artists. Later artists referenced both the stable iconic Mouse as well as the work of earlier artists. They addressed many issues through both portraiture and narrative works. Critics now assailed the established iconic Mouse as a symbol of corporate consumerism and American cultural imperialism, and artists visually expressed the dark (domination and excess) side of the Mouse rather than that of the plucky individual striving for abundance.

Table or Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Mouse: Debut, Copyright and Referenced

Chapter 2: Artists and the Mouse: Humor, Attachment, and the Gambit

Chapter 3: It All Started With a Mouse

Chapter 4: Nostalgia Mouse

Chapter 5: Next Stop Main Street Disneyland

Chapter 6: Love and Hate

Chapter 7: Portrait and the Mickeyfied

Chapter 8:Grim(m) Mouse

Chapter 9: Conclusions