Recognizing and classifying faces allows us to distinguish those who might regurgitate some delicious pabulum into our mouths from those who would reverse the process. In humans, the infant’s identification of two dots and a line as a facial pattern within hours of birth is arguably the first sign of conceptual thinking. The appeal of sad-eyed young’uns, be they kiddy or kitty, is rooted in the deepest level of mammalian pattern recognition. And although it was his ability to manipulate the mass media that got their foot in the front door, the Keane Big-Eye phenomenon would have never occurred if it were not for the deep, hardwired appeal of the paintings themselves.Įlectrophysiological Observation of Face Perception in Humans: Abstract While the Margaret Keane waif paintings challenge the received conceit regarding kitsch, sentimentality, and the measurable social function of art, Walter Keane’s self-creation (to the point of commandeering his wife’s lifework) is certainly a work of art on another level altogether. But much of the Keanes’ success is due to Walter’s showmanship, and his use of the media archetype of “The Artist” as a tool for carving social space. The Keane iconography- waifs, animals, staircases, the big-eyes-struck a deep public chord and eventually, through the marketing of cheap reproductions in magazine ads and franchise galleries (almost never using legitimate art world channels), permeated the media landscape. For Keane, Big-Eye art was commercial art, and in more ways than one. Greenbergian and other antinarrative art world trends relegated Keane to a lower circle than even the dread Salvador Dali and (subsequently rehabilitated) René Magritte. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Big-Eyes were a sort of pop cultural wallpaper pattern of posters, greeting cards, ads in comic books, Life magazine articles, and advertising and product design vernacular that hovered off somewhere between Campbell’s Soup paintings and Doris Day movies, a strange hybrid of unironic sentimentality and mass media gloss. Clearly, Walter Keane (or so | thought at the time) was more in touch with the specific needs of the human imagination, at least in that place and time, than the works being touted as the pinnacles of Western cultural evolution.įor me, the Big-Eye phenomenon was a memorable, but peripheral aspect of popular culture while | was growing up. This recalls the evolutionary strategy of neoteny, which extends the gestation and immaturity of such higher animals as elephants and humans. The entities described by UFO abductees bear a striking resemblance to Keane children-basically retaining the physical characteristics of early, even fetal stages of physical development. Jung had argued that the importance of flying saucers lies not in whether they are “real” in an empirical physical sense, but in their function as such a powerful symbol to so many people. Curiously, this was the exact point in history when UFO sightings began in earnest. The most popular art of the 1950s and early 1960s was not abstract expressionism, but Keane Big-Eye paintings. The most truly popular art of a given time period, as opposed to the most officially endorsed, most accurately reflects the current archetypes of the collective unconscious (this was in my Jung phase). Sebastian Record Player Telegraph and Historical Review) was as follows: a prophet is without honor in his own time. My basic thesis in “Close Encounters of the Keane Kind” (self-published in my short-lived late 1980s art zine St. Walter Keane lawsuit (more on that later). Sometime later | learned the facts about their official authorship and the legal proceedings of the Margaret vs. My first published piece of art criticism (in 1989) was an essay relating alien imagery to Walter Keane’s Big-Eye paintings.
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