The Critical Aesthetics of Disney World

ABSTRACT An analysis of Disney World as an aesthetic environment provides important insights. I ts many distinct areas constitute a multiplicity of environments —futuristic, ethnic, fantasy, adventure. Each shapes time, space, and movement in distinctive ways, making Disney World a microcosm of America's cultural pluralism and at the same time the kitsch of postmodernism. Yet Disney World is more than an entertainment park but conceals disturbing meanings behind its glittering images. In numerous ways it both illustrates and epitomises kinds of thought and practice that characterise the industrial-commercial culture of our period. Disney World, in fact, openly but subtly purveys the culture of consumption. Everything is converted into matter for consumption: national and ethnic traditions, science, technology, education, the family, history. This is an environment in which nothing is as it appears to be. Spectacular in scale and brilliant in execution, Disney World is a 'masterpiece of falsification, a megamonument to the commodification of culture.' The aesthetic analysis of Disney's worlds, by showing how realities are created and subverted, confronts us with the pervasiveness of the normative and the inseparability of the moral and the aesthetic. The challenge of our time is to reform knowledge and value in a way that is pluralistic and open-ended, and yet provides the basis for both decision and action.