When most people think about art they think of Picasso, Da Vinci, and Pollock, but probably not Tim Burton. Last Tuesday, I went to go see the Tim Burton Show at MOMA. When I got off the train I saw a line over a block long trying to get into the show. It was 10:30 am and the museum had just opened. The show has been open for three months and the tickets are still sold out for the day by 1 or 2pm. Luckily because I'm a CUNY student, I could go to the information desk to get in for free. Even there it was a ten minute wait for tickets. By the time I got to the front, the next opening to see Tim Burton was 2:30pm. I couldn't believe that so many people wanted to see the show that we had to wait 3 or 4 hours to get in.
I was a bit irritated that we had to wait so long, but at the same time I was thinking how amazing it is that Tim Burton could bring so many new people to view art at the MOMA. It seemed like many people there weren't regular art museum goers. I saw a lot of young children and families. The experience was sort of like going to a rock concert. Many viewers were wearing Tim Burton memorabilia or were dressed like a Tim Burton character. It definitely wasn't the normal art viewing crowd, which I really liked. To me, it seemed that because Tim Burton isn't a Fine Artist, it was a lot less intimidating for viewers to jump right in. They didn't need to understand art history or modernism to get into Tim Burton. They could walk and see his creatures and get it. They weren't looking at something they didn't understand and felt threatened or intimidated by it. They could just laugh or be weirded out or just think that a drawing or model was "cool". Much of the show featured work that the audience was familiar with through movies which made the experience a little more like seeing celebrities in Madame Tussaud's.
When finally getting to go into the Tim Burton exhibit it was packed. I made two quick laps through to know that I saw everything, but the space was so narrow and the work was so dense that it made viewing the work very uncomfortable.
As an artist who makes a lot of drawings, I really enjoyed seeing all of his rough sketches. I felt that the show gave me a better idea of who Tim Burton is as an artist-- not just a filmmaker. In his movies, you only see the most refined version and I really enjoyed seeing the process of how characters were drawn, created and then transformed into a moving image and made into 3-d models.
Walking through the exhibit I heard multiple people say that they had never seen something like this in a museum before. I thought this was really cool and interesting. This show was getting people who weren't regular arts patrons out to the museums. This was because this is art that doesn't look like "art". I think people felt very comforted that they could relate to the work because they had seen it in movies and could understand it.
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