The bohemian iconoclast and the corporate giant : Julie Taymor’s Staging of Disney’s The Lion King, or The portrait of the avant-garde artist as a corporate employee
Part of : Γράμμα : περιοδικό θεωρίας και κριτικής ; Vol.18, No.1, 2010, pages 137-150
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137-150
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Individuality, subjectivity and community in mass-mediated, “abstract” society
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The aim of this article is to examine the socioeconomic conditions that enable avant-garde artists to work for multinational corporations without sacrificing their individual aesthetic. A close reading of Julie Taymor’s critically acclaimed and commercially successful staging of Disney’s The Lion King will show that in our predominantly visual late-capitalist societies a sophisticated postdramatic visual aesthetic can be commodified without alienating the mass audiences. This commodification forces us to reevaluate the traditional modernist definitions of art in immanent aesthetic terms in a postmodern culture that witnesses the thorough commodification of high art and the high aestheticization of popular culture. These modifications in the cultural and aesthetic spheres will be analyzed through a Marxist theoretical frame that puts the modernist rigid dichotomies between high and popular art in a historical perspective.
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Περιέχει βιβλιογραφία.The individual and the mass: literary and cultural reflections
