Two recent posts here come together to reinforce my point:
A month ago, on Nov. 15, I wrote about the Disney show at the New Orleans Museum of Art, detailing why giving museum galleries over to show of only Disney animation pictures, curated by Disney employees, who also wrote the catalogue, paid for and tied the opening to the debut of the movie from which some of the pictures come — The Princess and the Frog — is all wrong.
And on Dec. 6, I wrote here about journalism, and why it’s wrong for reporters and critics to “protect” arts institutions from scrutiny and criticism.
The New Orleans exhibition opened in November and the movie opened last Friday — topping the weekend box office but with a lower-than-hoped-for total.
Time for a media assessment.
According to my search on Factiva, a database of articles published in newspapers and magazines, the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper has run more than two dozen articles, shorts or listings that mention the Dreams Come True exhibition in the last three months.
I could not find a single word of criticism of the exhibition or the museum in any of them. About the only non-positive glimmer of thought came in the article I cited in November, which quoted museum director E. John Bullard (right) as rejecting people who “look[ed] down their noses at popular culture,” which — of course — no one had done.
Far more typical in the newspaper were items like this paragraph, published on on Nov. 11 in an article of short takes listing “five things rattling around in the head of one movie buff“:
NOMA’s “Dreams Come True” Disney exhibition ” — Art and pop culture collide at what promises to be a magical family-friendly show, timed to coincide with the release next month of “The Princess and the Frog,” Disney’s New Orleans-set animated fairy tale.
So in addition to hoodwinking the museum, turning it into a commercial gallery, Disney has also managed to turn the local newspaper into an arm of its PR machine. (One article actually touts Disney’s merchandise for the movie.)
Nice work, for Disney, but not for the public. Both the museum and the newspaper have acted abominably.
Photos: Courtesy Times-Picayune, New Orleans Museum of Art