The much-hyped exhibition The World of Tim Burton arrived at London’s Design Museum a week ago and we made it down to see what all the fuss was about. As something of a Tim Burton agnostic – I like several of his earlier films but find his more recent output intolerable and am less than impressed by his supposedly originality, given that most of his work consists of new, inferior versions of projects that already exist – I was interested to see if this would change my mind or offer new insight.
Sadly, it didn’t. Looking at photos of other international versions of this exhibition (the London show is the final stop in a world tour), we seem to have been given a rather stripped-down version and there are huge omissions – no Ed Wood? – while other parts seem needlessly padded. There is little sense of narrative, with the layout seemingly aimed at satisfying people with short attention spans who only came for the most popular titles like Beetlejuice and Wednesday rather than telling a story, and it mistakes murkiness for moodiness at times, making some costumes hard to appreciate.
What’s more, Burton’s art – which I genuinely do like – is a bit too one-dimensional to sustain a show like this. After a while, it begins to feel as though you are simply looking at the same thing repeatedly, much of it looking like fan versions of Gahan Wilson and Charles Addams creations. I’m just not sure that his art is varied or original enough to sustain a project like this.
The worst thing though – and this is a complaint I find myself making again and again about major exhibitions – is just how sloppy and badly researched the damn thing is. The curators were clearly out of their comfort zone when discussing Burton’s influences, which I imagine they consider to be worthlessly low-brow – gothic horror, monster movies and the like – and so lazy mistakes creep in. Like what? Well, mentioning ‘Universal Monsters’ when the displays are all AIP and Ray Harryhausen films (and Universal horror movies are completely absent from the imagery) and then saying that Vincent Price was the star of ‘several Hammer films‘. Price, of course, never worked for Hammer – not once. I’m sure that in the minds of the people that put exhibitions together for major galleries, that doesn’t matter because it’s all the same thing in their minds – but I’m sure I don’t need to tell you why it does. Here’s the thing – if we know that this stuff is bullshit, how can we trust anything else that they tell us?
This, the missing films, the lack of credit for key collaborators (Henry Selick, the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas, doesn’t even get a mention in the display devoted to the film) or even acknowledgement of Burton’s sources – in the rush to proclaim him a unique visionary genius, there is little reference to the fact that much of his work is based on the ideas of others, be they novels, the films he has (badly) remade or simply screenplays by writers with a more consistent track record than he has.
It’s not awful by any means – if you are a Tim Burton fan, you’ll certainly find a lot here to enjoy. When I was there on a Wednesday morning, it was heaving (with some quite dreadful people who seemed of the theatrical luvvie persuasion and were keen to tell everyone around them how they’d “been on stage with Tim and Helena at the Opera House – though they probably won’t remember” – I’ll bet not…). I have to say that by the time I finally reached the exit (I had to queue up just to leave because you have to exit through the gift shop and everyone was blocking the entrance) I was rather bored. This didn’t make me want to take another look at the Burton films I didn’t enjoy – or even the ones I did enjoy, frankly.
Watch our video review:
DAVID FLINT
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