Attached to the Mouse

The Mouse and the Duck are celebrities created by Disney through its new art form, the animated cartoon. Using various outlets including mass-media, television, and theme parks, Disney made the Mouse an icon of corporate success and American culture. From Pop art to the present day, more than a hundred artists have incorporated the Mouse's image, humor, and nostalgia into their work. HOW AND WHY? Attached to the Mouse is the first art history analyzing use of Disney imagery by such contemporary artists as Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Warhol, Chagoya, Thiebaud, Helnwein, Boltanski, Dion, and Pensato. This book explores the impact of Disney, including artists' economic and psychological motivations, on contemporary art. Links to: Author's Website and Author's Blog for Attached to the Mouse

For at least a half-century Mickey Mouse, ears and all, has served as one of the most potent icons in contemporary visual culture.…But however much that (deceptively) ingenuous face and unique silhouette turn up in Pop paintings, social-commentary cartoons, and even abstract sculpture, writers and historians have let Mickey's ubiquity pass without substantial comment. Until now. Defying the perils of post-modernist close reading, pop-culture fetishism, and the fabled wrath of Disney Corp., Holly Crawford proffers an exhaustive documentation, classification, and analysis of Mickey's many appearances in the visual art of our time. Her study fills a gap in the critical history of recent art, not to mention in Mouseology., Enjoyable, brilliant, readable, and enormously informative. The seminal study of how mass media institutions-Disney and Art-function in our culture, written with flashes of humor. It's likely to be a premier resource for years to come., Attached to the Mouse is a result of painstaking research into this history and penetrating analysis of the psychology behind the phenomenon.... For the first time, an art historian has chronicled the artists' use of Mickey as a personal language....Remaining impartial with the issues she raises in order to embrace the tension contained in this holistic vision, Crawford tackles the present-day crisis of art criticism at its core....Attached to the Mouse will prove to be an essential resource underpinning the foundation by which this search for holism comes into form., In her innovative book Attached to the Mouse Holly Crawford examines the appropriation of the iconic images of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck with thoughtful scholarship and spirited humor.

Holly Crawford is an artist, art historian, and the Director of AC Institute. She received her Ph.D. in Art History and Theory from the University of Essex, United Kingdom, an M.A. Economics and M.S.P.H. in Behavioral Science from UCLA and she is a nonclinical Fellow at NYU Medical School Psychoanalytic Center.