17 Dec MSCHF Recasts an Ancient Greek Sculpture With Mickey Mouse
Source Credit: Content and images from Artnet News. Read the original article - https://news.artnet.com/art-world/mschf-famous-mickey-mouse-disney-sculpture-laocoon-2589043
Art collective MSCHF has just revealed a rodent-themed artwork that’s been long in the making—three years, to be specific, or decades, if we’re going by copyright terms.
Walt Disney and His Sons is MSCHF’s playful take on the famed Hellenistic Greek carving Laocoön and His Sons, held in the Museo Pio-Clementino in Rome. In the collective’s cast vinyl version, Disney, in the part of the mythical doomed priest, is seen tussling with his most iconic creation, Mickey Mouse, whose long black limbs snake around the entire tableau. Unlike Laocoön, whose face is locked in agony as he is destroyed by serpents, Disney’s features reflect some manner of ecstasy.
The work was only made possible by the entry of the 1928 iteration of Mickey Mouse into the public domain earlier this year. It’s an event MSCHF anticipated when it began taking pre-orders for the sculpture for just $100 in 2021, touting the yet-to-be-unveiled collectible as depicting, in its winking description, a “Famous Mouse” owned by a “Famous Animation Co.” Buyers received a token, which they could claim for an artwork that would be delivered when the copyright term on the most famous mouse of all expired.
MSCHF, Walt Disney and His Sons (2024). Photo courtesy of MSCHF.
Disney, of course, has fought tooth and nail for decades to keep its most valuable IP under protection—a battle that has seen the U.S. copyright term extended to 95 years. MSCHF’s sculpture, while playful, also casts a critical eye on copyright law, particularly “the gray area at its edges,” as MSCHF chief creative officer Kevin Wiesner told me over email.
“MSCHF has time and again run up against the discrepancies between the trajectory that appropriation, sampling, and remix have taken in art history, as opposed to in law,” he added. “They are highly divergent; things that are so historical they are practically boring in art turn out to be actively under negotiation in courtrooms.”
To wit, Wiesner pointed out the landmark case that saw the U.S. Supreme Court rule that Andy Warhol had infringed upon the copyright of photographer Lynn Goldsmith. Closer to home, MSCHF was at the receiving end of a 2021 lawsuit from Nike over its appropriation of Air Maxes for its Satan Shoes.
MSCHF’s “Famous Mouse” tokens.
MSCHF’s Famous Mouse drop, however, sought to skirt restrictions with one clever trick. The project, said Wiesner, “set out to use a classic shared delusion of the art world—that you can sell a concept—as a loophole to offer public domain Mickey before he was in the public domain.”
Keen-eyed viewers will also notice that Walt Disney and His Sons features two colorless and headless figures amid the scrum. MSCHF noted in an Instagram post that they “foreshadow the forthcoming copyright expiration of two more of [Disney’s] classic characters.” We’ll call them Famous Dog and Famous Duck.
MSCHF, Walt Disney and His Sons (2024). Photo courtesy of MSCHF.
The delivery of the Famous Mouse sculpture marks the conclusion of one of the group’s few durational projects (its zany investment death pool Tontine, however, is still ongoing)—and the first, Wiesner noted, to come to fruition. For this reason, he views the work as arriving at a sort of “retrospective moment” for the group. It follows MSCHF’s first museum show last year and precedes its forthcoming monograph (set for release in 2025 by Phaidon Press)—Walt Disney and His Sons just about managed to squeak into the book.
“In 2021, the idea of 2024 was so far in the future it might as well have not existed. We were at that time releasing new work on average every 10 days, and a three-year timeline was borderline inconceivable under those circumstances. We had blind faith that we’d still be around to make the figure, but it was also kind of imaginary,” he said.
“I’m very glad that the thousand people who took a leap of faith and purchased the idea of an artwork that would be illegal for three years now get to see that promise made good.”
Source Credit: Content and images from Artnet News. Read the original article - https://news.artnet.com/art-world/mschf-famous-mickey-mouse-disney-sculpture-laocoon-2589043