Walt Disney was a Midwestern entrepreneur with great will and drive who revolutionized the animation business by adding the elements of sound. He built a leisure-time empire by transforming the traditionally tawdry amusement park into a setting suitable for the whole family. He was a visionary who saw an experimental city of tomorrow rising out of the swampland he purchased in central Florida which is now called Disney World. But Walt Disney made no pretense whatever about being either an artist or an intellectual.
By what seems to be a paradox, he left almost half of his huge estate to found a community of the performing arts—an institute where students would come as artists to learn from other accomplished artists in a less structured format than the university or the conservatory. His heirs carried through his wishes, and thus was born the California Institute of the Arts. It is the most radical large-scale experiment in the history of the creative arts, a school where musicians, filmmakers, dancers, actors, painters, sculptors, and designers interact and collaborate as a part of their training. "Here we are, creating a highly elitist school, when the central concern of most institutions is how to provide education for everybody," said Dr. Robert Corrigan, Cal Arts' president, in his first address to the institute's new faculty. "Here we are, trying to evolve highly participatory forms of governance with a group of people who, by their very nature, tend to be prima donnas. Here we are, establishing professional schools in each of the arts which will require the most rigorous kind of discipline, and at the same time we are committed to an idea of interaction between the arts which may very likely blur, if not break down, those same disciplines." […]
