Disneyfied Participation in the Neoliberal Art Museum

• In Event: 46.053 - The Disney Curriculum: Pedagogies of Being and Buying

Abstract

This essay lays out the Disneyfication of art museum education, specifically in relation to curricular practices that claim enhanced participation and civic engagement for their visitors. I consider how participationism in the art museum acts as a fetish for more political, antagonistic, and sustained forms of participative action in society. I provide an historical account of the gradual Disneyfication of art museums and their educations over the last century inline with the spread of consumer culture and megacorporations, followed by a decoupling of the interests of participatory approaches to art museum curricula from their neoliberal ideologies, and ending with a series of questions posed to educators within so-called participatory institutions. Throughout, I adapt the perspectives of Jodi Dean (2009; 2012) and Slavoj Žižek (1999) to examine how the Disneyfication of the participatory art museum amounts to an empty participationism that domesticates and neutralizes civic engagement towards neoliberal logics. In particular, theories associated with post-politics and communicative capitalism (Dean, 2005) will be used to clarify the myths and constraints at play within a participatory paradigm in art, culture, and education that can reframe the good we think we are up to in curricular and pedagogical practices that claim to enhance democratic politics and civic transformation. As a backdrop to my thesis, I analyze the Walker Art Center’s 2012, three-day symposium titled Discourse and Discord: Architecture of Agonism from the Kitchen Table to the City Street for embedded suppositions aligned with participationism. This example is developed in order to suggest that participation, once Disneyfied, functions in the public sphere to further buttressing neoliberal mandates that keep us busy and feeling self-actualized while perpetuating a post-political landscape where political issues are concealed, neglected, parodied, sanitized, and/or quickly forgotten while continuing on unchallenged and unchanged. In this sense, “participationism plagues us. More than dismantling or distributing power, we've invisibilized and extended it” (Not an Alternative, 2010, para. 5). In order to further tease out this point, Discourse and Discord is contrasted against more antagonistic and unsanctioned forms of participation and public pedagogy such as the Occupy Museums movement (see Beery, Fischer, Greenberg, & Polendo, 2013).

Author

• Nadine M. Kalin, University of North Texas