Disneyfication of Peter Max
Carl Jung believed that art provides insight to the subconscious. But his brand of psycho and art therapy assumes that there is depth and discovery to the subconscious in question. That is not always the case. Peter Max scrawls his intentions clearly (in three letters) across every canvas he covers.
Proof that you don’t need psychoanalysis to be happy—Peter Max is ecstatic. Billions of dollars and worldwide recognition can do that to a man. And his art reflects happiness—it is bright and nonsensical and cheery. Perhaps that’s a contributing factor to his mass appeal—Max paintings sell like Disney t-shirts and McDonalds cheeseburgers. The concepts behind his creations are so absurdly simple that Max himself can’t even predict in advance where his brushes will go. He dips and dabs and scribbles with velocity until something feels right. And when it’s all over the product is so absurdly simple that Max can’t explain what it is. “These shapes, I’m used to these kinds of lines. I like to scribble.” If he were an abstract expressionist this Pollack-like statement could imply emotional depth, where the act is the art. But he’s not an abstract expressionist, or a surrealist. There is no depth. Max is a commercialist.
For Max, art media is secondary to prime time media. “Imagine being an actor and never being in a movie” he says, “you gotta practice your craft.” His studio is rumored to employ over 100 people to churn out the by product of his craft, which consists mainly of two categories; nonsensical scribbles and celebrity faces. Larry King, Brooke Shields, the Dalai Lama have all been captured by his brush, and they are not terrible portraits. The man does have skill—no one disputes that his earlier work showed attention to detail and technical competence. But once fame was achieved—between 1969 and 1971 Max grossed $1.1 billion—the focus shifted to quantity. If there is one Dalai Lama, there are 108 Dalai Lama’s.
The celebrity faces fit perfectly with Max’s mantra. “You gotta be in media.” He said. “How do you get in media? You do something media-worthy.” Like revealing 44 portraits of President Obama just before his inauguration as the 44th president. Or designing the side of a Continental Airlines plane. Or buying 36 Corvettes, one for each year they were made, when the man doesn’t even like cars. No, the half a million dollar collection was purchased as a PR stunt. Max planned to paint them in his signature colors and drive them onto a football field during the Super Bowl with cheerleaders on top. Yet while the Corvette stunt is still a figment of Max’s imagination, the cars have been left in a Brooklyn warehouse to accumulate dust. I can’t help but feel sorry for the young Peter Max, an artist who might have actually cared about art. But if that man existed he has been fossilized under shameless self promotion. The pixie dust of Max’s craft has buried him.
