![]() ![]() ![]() On October 25, 1997, the opening day of The Architecture of Reassurance, the Northern Artists Front protested with picket signs reading Disney Kills Imagination’ and Corporate Art Still Sucks’ while little girls showed up wearing Tinker Bell outfits. So what happens when a member of that critical group decides to present these things for further observation? Marling observes: “ There’s so much bashing of materialism at the university, the phrase consumer culture’ gets tossed around as though it’s the next best thing to original sin.” “ Pop culture” is not historically a thing to be respected or studied by the “ educated.” While everybody opened up their student mailboxes to The New Yorker or The Nation, I opened up mine to Entertainment Weekly. Television? “ If I’m away from the television for more than five minutes I get nervous.” “ Nothing human,” she declares, “ Offends me.” Her statements would have been a great reassurance to me as a pop culture-minded, aesthetically-driven first-year at a liberal, political college. As for Disney conspiracy theorists? Insane. In the many interviews I read about this exhibition, she stands up for her area of expertise, “ pop culture,” with intelligence and wit, even with such pointed questions about Disney’s possibly “ untoward imaginative life rooted in childhood” and union labor disputes at the Disney studio in 1941. I feel a kinship between myself and Karal Ann Marling, the curator of the exhibition. Of course, if I had lived in Minnesota at the age of 11, I would not be wishing to go back in time, because 1) I might have seen it and 2) I would not have spent many of my formative years taking car trips down to Disneyland. ![]() What I wouldn’t do to go back in time and walk through the Walker’s galleries, set up to suggest the hub-and-spoke configuration of Disneyland. If only I had lived in Minnesota then, I thought. While digging through press archives a couple months ago, I discovered something extraordinary: a file for the Walker’s 1997 presentation of The Architecture of Reassurance: Designing Disney’s Theme Parks. ![]()
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