big-eyed art -- so helpless and appealing

I haven’t seen the movie, just the trailers and read some reviews, and since I’m not usually a fan of the director I doubt I’ll get there. I know about ‘Big Eyes’ because I was once sitting on a stool wondering why these pictures of odd alien children were hanging in this bar. I understood it was a west-coast fad flowing eastward, but the peculiar side-show appeal of the images was somehow too creepy to analyze. Mammals grow into their eyes which are pretty much the right size to start with. This leaves human babies and the babies of all our furry friends with big eyes at birth. This big eye association is wired in, and sympathy, nurturing, and the desire to protect all come awake when eyes are too large for the head, even though these inborn inclinations rarely make it to a conscious level. 

So what would happen to our built-in ‘baby-sensing circuits’ if someone made a painting of a waif with really big, absolutely enormous eyes? Guess they’d scream with all their subliminal might, and folks everywhere would vaguely register some sort of emotional tug, although not consciously of course. As a hook for art this is in itself a cheap trick, but there’s darker implication. This isn’t a pleasant world for the orphans in city slums, wearing ragged little tops and looking up ‘so helpless and appealing.’ This ‘big eyes’ business isn’t just kitsch sentimental, it’s poignantly unwholesome, but it isn’t Walter’s fault he got famous. Not really.

The movie, as I understand it, is primarily about aggressive salesmanship, personal betrayal, and their frequent association, who knew, but along the way there’s also some mighty snooty disrespect for any culture which would support such tripe. So who here today, I wonder, can afford to feel superior watching “Big Eyes”? Walter Keane, that trailblazing precursor to the whole ‘Warholian Era,’ arose from the primal ooze of breezy california abstraction, as barren and unyielding as the freeways. Even if it was repetitious and mindless, at least it was a picture of something. 

The folly of fashion inevitably becomes visible just a few years down the line, but the next big thing can seem so beguiling at the time. The real issue for our purposes here has to do with the sheep-like mentality of a public that can be herded and penned by the whistles and clicks of cheap hustlers, past and present. Can anyone say 'well that was the way it was then, but it’s wonderfully different now?' The actual answer to Walter Keane and his goofy art would have been, then as now, to buy something else.