It is fashionable to speak of the Art of Disney. The highbrows like to trace it all back to those quizzical Greek vase painters of the fifth century B.C., who liked to draw satyrs fraternizing, playfully, with gods and goddesses alike. The whimsical and grotesque fantasy of Japanese Kamakura scroll paintings is commonly brought into the discussion. To hear the highbrows talk, there would seem to be no doubt about it – it is all very aesthetic; and just as surely as da Vinci is an artist associated with a smile, so Disney is an artist associated with a mouse.
It is not much good telling that to Mr. Disney. He is little interested in Art. He is the head of an industry in which millions are invested, thousands employed, an industry with a complex organization of production and distribution, an industry like any whose chief concern is money. To Mr. Disney an artist is someone with long hair who eats kippers in a garret. This is why he smiles so happily and says "Me an artist? You are fooling!"
Yet in a certain sense Disney is an artist. His works may vary a great deal in quality. They can be sickly whimsical, hair-raisingly vulgar, shockingly sadistic; but the good ones are good, and the fact that what he does is to supervise the work of others does not disqualify him from the title of artist. Raphael did much the same. The painters of the Renaissance would employ a whole studio-full of assistants who prepared the canvases and painted in sections of the pictures, so that it is hard to tell the master's work from the work of his employees.
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