Tim Burton @ The Museum of Modern Art

I grew up with Tim Burton. Nothing’s better for a goth kid than a good dose of Beetlejuice, Nightmare Before Christmas and the entirely relatable Edward Scissorhands. So, there have been many years of dedicated Burton fandom which I’m willing to admit to, and the posters to prove it. He has an undeniably recognizable aesthetic, and he gave us two excellent Batman movies, so I have nothing personal against the man.

I was still fairly skeptical of a Tim Burton art show. My appreciation and informal study of Burton made it apparent that everything of his that I truly liked had a very heavy dose of other creators mixed in – people responsible for honing his loose, weird ideas into great cinema with their own technical skills. This always left a significant question about just how much Burton himself was responsible for. Just how much credit should he be taking for these things?

The Burton exhibit, now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, answers a lot of nagging questions I’ve had.

A majority of the Burton show is comprised of visual artworks across the walls in an inadvertently disconcerting maze of a gallery that was too crowded to properly appreciate or navigate. The inherent problem with this is that Tim Burton is not an artist who works in a still, visual medium. Nearly all of his works on paper are loose, sketchy, and honestly, amateurish. Burton spent his early visual arts years riffing heavily on Gahan Wilson and Ralph Steadman (and not improving on the genre at all), until he slowly became his own artist in the late 1980s and developed his spindly, light, nervous style. He’s spent thirty years drawing the same monsters and misanthropes, but one would be very hard pressed to find the slightest bit of creative evolution between these pieces. He’s running in a very profitable hamster wheel, so the drive to evolve and change doesn’t really seem to be there. Much of his work’s subject matter is intentionally stuck in the nightmares of pre-adolescence, but does that mean the style needs to live there too?

This is the documentation of one man’s vital, however unfocused, contributions to a creative process, but these are not the works of a talented draftsman. This is fine – he’s plenty talented in other aspects, but I can’t comfortably admire these works on paper and feel as if I am being honest. There are a few larger, completed visual works, but they don’t truly show a marked improvement of style. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s a hint of arrogance – “I’m Tim Burton – I don’t need to try harder.”

This doesn’t make the show any less enjoyable, however. Scattered across the gallery are actual props and figures used in his many films, which would make any collector drool. Among the amazing props assembled are the eyes of Large Marge from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, the original Edward Scissorhands suit, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman outfit and the Penguin’s stroller from Batman Returns, as well as three Batman cowls. Another case contained an Oogie Boogie stop motion figure under a black light, while another contained a Dr. Finkelstein, an array of Jack Skellington Heads, and other figures from The Nightmare Before Christmas, as well as The Corpse Bride. Various sculptures, inspired by (but not fabricated by) Burton are also in cases around the rooms, which are amazingly beautiful, scary, complex and enthralling. Of course, Burton himself made none of these things, but they do all have a common origin in his awkward drawings.

They wouldn’t miss just one Jack Skellington head, right? There are so many!

I’m not here to cast aspersions upon Burton’s creativity, but I do feel that instead of worshipping an artist blindly, we need to obtain some perspective. I spent five years in art school having perspective shoved in my face every waking moment, so I can’t really escape it now. I’m also completely open to admitting that the dangerously crowded floor of the show, and temperatures of at least 80 degrees inside, made for a generally frustrating atmosphere. Much of the party I was with fled to cooler temperatures and areas in which they were not constantly groped by people on all sides jostling for a better look at the next scribble. I plan on returning in the spring, when the crowds have thinned out.

I grew up with Tim Burton, but I don’t think he grew up alongside me.