Peanuts on Parade

Gimmick or Art?

(original 01 Sept 2001; current rev from draft 26 Sept 2012)

    Marketing gimmicks or public art?  What are we to make of the waves of cattle invading downtown Chicago, moose in Toronto, or cartoon characters holding down street corners in St Paul?  These fiberglass sculptures seem to be quite successful examples of the former while being not altogether unworthy of the latter designation as art.

    It would seem a bit preposterous to label the individual units of these events as objects of fine art; yet, perhaps their true artistic merit lies in the effect of the pieces as a whole.  Each of these sidewalk invasions has been labeled, with the full complicity of the local arts community, as public art events, yet each has also been criticized as mere marketing gimmicks.

    What is it then that might qualify these objects as art?  Perhaps we need to examine these events not as potential “gallery” exhibitions, but rather as designators of place and evocative emotional agents, i.e. art.

    World travelers extoll the joys of the platz, the rural English square or the West Coast walking mall.  Spaces that encourage people to congregate create an often voyeuristic atmosphere of carnival with extensive benefits to the neighborhood’s culture and economy.  This in mind, one finds it amazing what a few life-size gimmicks can do to draw people to a site, creating a modern-style street fair – a pedestrian piazza – a designated sense of place.

    Apart from the general attention Toronto’s moose project generated regarding the quality and status of their downtown neighborhoods, the city reported an influx of two million tourists to view the sculptures, tourists that spent an estimated $260 million (CA$400 million) and generated an estimated $3.25 million in free, international media attention.  Given a herd size of 326 sculptures, each moose was worth approximately $798,000 to the local business community before contributing to an overall $910,000 (CA$1.4 million) contribution to Canadian charities through auction.

    Similarly, Chicago reports the 200-strong cattle stampede to have attracted one million visitors spending $200 million in the local economy and generating $3.5 million for charity.  While St Paul declines to place a fiscal impact figure on last year’s Peanuts on Parade project, estimates are that 450,000 people were attracted to see the 101 Snoopy statues.  While fewer people may have seen Snoopy, auctions of 61 of the statues raised an amazing figure of over $1 million dollars for memorial scholarships and helped finance a permanent memorial park for Peanuts creator Charles M. Schultz, a St Paul native.

    But is this art?  Having spent two years watching the Peanuts set-up across my street and having interacted personally with those moose and cows, I would have to argue that these mass-produced, designer kewpie dolls do indeed move beyond the basic marketing goal of inducing a desired action or preference by the masses of people stopping to interact with them.

    Although each individual sculpture is based on the same fiberglass mold, local artists were commissioned in each case to personalize each piece, creating sculptures that reflect the culture, diversity and creativity of each locale.  The artist took on the specific generic cultural image and arranged or decorated it in a manner addressing the iconic status of that object while establishing new and varied relationships between the viewing public and that symbol. 

    This is not to disregard repetition in vision or the concept of mass production.  Though the projects as a whole seem to fall a bit short of Warhol’s critique of the mass produced object, much of the creativity seems directed similarly towards establishing a sense of cultural inclusiveness – a shared experience.  Efforts to promote diversity are also encouraged – a moose is draped in the colors of the gay rainbow, Snoopy wears a kilt, a cow doubles as a menorah…  Some of the images play off aspects of iconic imagery, a cow as a source of nourishment, Snoopy as a playmate.  Somewhat troublesome perhaps, many of the forms also reflect the contemporary blurring of boundaries between publicly sponsored art and commercial marketing with corporate logos, professional sports team uniforms and blatant product tie-ins co-opting the creative process.

    A sense of nostalgia is not the only emotive response generated by these programs.  Most apparent with the Snoopy statues in St Paul, Peanuts on Parade has encouraged a real sense of community and of shared mourning in memory of a friend we have all lost.  In the apartments over O’Gara’s Bar, Schultz may have drawn the first Snoopy.  Ever wonder about the barber pole in the cartoons?  His father owned a barbershop on the corner of Snelling and Selby.  The boys and girls Schultz captured in his comic strips still roam the city, real persons with characteristic personalities intact.  (I was gratified to meet, for instance, the real Peppermint Pattie.)

    The act of viewing the Snoopy statues generated a sense of community amongst the participants.  The personality of each Snoopy interacted with each viewer in a unique, subjective way, yet served to strengthen a greater, more objective sense of connectivity, a shared sense of mourning and the ability to even more tightly weave the strands of one’s individual life experience into the everyday social fabric of the community – whether you recognized Snoopy in the uniform of your favorite sports team, viewed Snoopy “participating” in your favorite hobby or sport or merely noted him hanging out in your neighborhood.  Because of the respect and personal knowledge the Twin Cities hold of Schultz, Peanuts on Parade was perhaps somewhat uniquely able to evoke a higher emotional engagement on the part of the participants, efficiently serving as signifiers toward more abstract emotions and types onto which we could effectively focus our more abstract feelings in order to sort them out and come to grips with them in a shared, communal environment.  It is perhaps no surprise that the individual Snoopy statues were able to raise a respectable $17,000 for charity per statue at public auction.

    In this way, the Peanuts-related events in St Paul may indicate to other cities how to most effectively place these fiberglass masterpieces into a communal context that maximizes their effectiveness in representing and defining the community through a public arts event, while avoiding much of the eye-brow raising, high-brow shaking accompanying the proliferation of these events as tourist-aimed marketing endeavors.

    Despite the motives of planning committees, the economic impact of each of these events is doomed to decrease through repetition and proliferation, somewhat as the impact of window displays has seemed to lessen in major department stores.  As “fiberglass sculptural units” become a budget category for every city’s tourism bureau and as both St Paul and Chicago have chosen to follow their successes with new shows, it seems that a bit of future discretion might help preserve the fiscal success of such events and promote a higher cultural impact.  While Chicago gets credit for having started the fad in North America, St Paul might have determined the most appropriate usage of this powerful tool by linking it to a meaningful public event, in this case the mourning of a favored son.  If each city limited the use of these shows to celebrating great events such as anniversaries, or for introducing large numbers of tourists drawn to international sporting events, world fairs and other one-time events to local culture, the shows could retain their ability to attract further tourist dollars while adding greatly to the local culture as a means of self-reflection and identity building.  The increased emotional attachment to the sculptures would also enhance their ability to raise funds for charity.

    Some changes to apparent ground rules might then seem in order.  Apart from local sports teams, it seems a bit sketchy to justify over marketing symbolism into the design of the figures.  Compromises may be reached; for instance, Ecolab has sponsored both a Snoopy and a Charlie Brown (2001’s Peanuts on Parade character) dressed in lab coats, pursuing scientific discovery.  The sculptures are well done and seem to celebrate the joys of scientific discovery over an affiliation with a particular corporation.  Also the figures have been placed in a plaza amongst events celebrating summer education programs for children.  A passerby is free to associate the figures with the process of learning in addition to the corporate generosity of Ecolab.

    Secondly, the events would be a lot more interesting and perhaps more emotionally effective if artists were granted from freedom to explore iconoclasm relative the base image.  The beheading of a Snoopy statue by vandals in a low-income St Paul neighborhood generated a lot of incidental debate regarding the concepts of community, childhood in an urban setting and the extent to which shared communal values are linked to economic and racial backgrounds.  Opening the images to alternative interpretations could thus deepen participation in the event by other civic communities, thereby expanding definitions of community and creating an increased relevance of that icon to that community by which it has been, even if only temporarily, appropriated.

    The marketing appeal of the images could be harnessed to draw others into neighborhoods that desperately need greater integration into the larger community.  If the sculptures can be empowered through art to help define community and strive to be inclusive through the use of symbolic and cultural imagery, why not co-opt them to bring people to inner city parks, increase pedestrian traffic in developing neighborhoods and encourage patronage of small businesses that normally cater to more isolated immigrant groups?  It would be much more difficult to criticize such programs for lacking artistic merit if both the apparent artistic qualities of the programs and their marketing potential were both directed at helping the city as a whole.  Where’s the shame in pandering to tourist dollars if the program also clearly deepens the community’s self-knowledge and facilitations further interaction and integration of a city’s disparate communities?

    Whether art or gimmick, the fiberglass sculpture programs are a demonstrated success.  The appeal of the particular images attract tourists and money while building up the local community through the sculptures’ creative power to designate space and the decoration of these form to create a sense of inclusivity and participation. 

   Questions of art versus gimmick may then be mere matters of debate over form versus substance.  The answers would thus lie with a city’s usage of such events, whether the city values sponsorship appeal over intellectual imagery in the decoration of the individual forms and where the individual forms are placed (not to mention levels of supportive programming geared towards host neighborhoods).  By increasing the artistic freedom of expression in the decoration of the forms and allowing the forms to draw tourists to new destinations within the city, the marketing appeal of such programs might be synergistically increased.

    But, in order for the fiberglass sculptures to retain their power of appeal, artistically or for drawing tourism, such shows should be initiated more sparingly and with greater attention given to the images’ ability to represent or interact with the greatest number of civic communities while being organized around events of greater communal significance such as anniversaries, memorial or moments for shared self-reflection. 

    Used appropriately, fiberglass sculpture shows will build the economy, designate space and create a sense of communal discovery and self-retrospection.  The market and the arts can be a paired team of oxen, together pulling towards the same goal.  To the question, “Gimmick or Art?” one can safely answer “Both!”