Word: cartoons
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...three different approaches to the phenomenon of the female body in visual culture. "Fleshbags" is the most ambitious part of the exhibition because it spans the historical scope of the construction of female sexuality. Displays ranging from details of Botticelli's "Venus" to Manet's "Olympia" to Playboy cartoons remind the viewer that this is not just a criticism of a contemporary issue, but rather the problematic perceptions of the female body have been deeply imbedded and indoctrinated into social standards. The responsibility of art is a central issue; female nudes once considered the norm...
...hideous imperfection of breast augmentation. The audience visualizes a reclining woman, as the breasts lie on a bed-like platform. The artists reduce the woman to the sexual organs; her breasts now signify and define female sexuality. The issue at hand slaps the audience in the face--the Playboy cartoon of the man in the museum is put into practice. The viewer, like the man, is caught constructing the image of the woman...
...then Warner) hit on a bright idea: eliminate the middleman and market directly to an avid public. In malls throughout the U.S. and around the world, the 268 Disney Stores and the 67 owned by Warner sell not just the usual T shirts and gewgaws but the whole corporate cartoon experience, once removed. These outpost embassies for the Magic Kingdom and Warner's more raucous cartoon realm are more than stores: they are fun fairs, playgrounds, date destinations, suburban social centers...
...when the Diz Biz people first thought about retail stores, the notion was anything but a sure thing. To make it work required a happy confluence of factors: a resurgence of appealing films like The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast from Disney's cartoon unit, the company's revived marketing savvy under Eisner and the rise of the mall culture. "It's become instinctual for us," says Eisner, "that we do something either really, really big or really, really small. With these stores, we wanted to bring the Disney feeling into a mall environment...
Warner got its first hint of a synergistic gold mine by monitoring the sales of animation cels (individual painted frames of a cartoon) on the art market. Cels of the sort the company had capriciously destroyed in the early '70s were selling for upwards of $10,000 a decade later. These works are a prestige staple of the Warner stores. As Chuck Jones, ace director of Warner cartoons, notes, "The French Impressionists were an art form that became a business. Animation is a business that became an art form...