There is no film in Western animation that is as capital-A Art as Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. One-upping Into the Spider-Verse’s already incredible feat, this second Spider-Verse ambitiously worked in six different animation styles to bring its multiverse and thousands of Spider-people to life. The movie is yet another example of why animated films should be taken as seriously as their live-action counterparts, a conversation that became louder during last year’s Oscars when Guillermo del Toro, in his acceptance speech for the stop-motion Pinnochio, said that “animation is cinema.” Across the Spider-Verse captures the infinite potential of animation as art — and, funnily enough, cheekily thumbs its nose at the art establishment right off the bat.
The opening scene is loaded with sassy subtext from the filmmakers. The Guggenheim, one of New York City’s most famous and architecturally striking art museums, is under attack by the Vulture, a Leonardo da Vinci-inspired sketch brought to life that flies around in a stark monochromatic contrast to the bright impressionism of Gwen’s universe. During the action, where Spider-Man 2099 and Spider-Woman enter the fray from a dizzyingly glitchy portal, the Vulture slices the head off of Jeff Koons’ blue Balloon Dog sculpture, revealing a pile of tiny balloon dogs inside of it. (The patrons inside react with a collective “ooo”!) It’s both very funny and very clever.
Koons, who holds the record for the most expensive piece ever sold by a living artist at a public auction at $91 million, is one of the small handful of currently active artists that an average person could name, and his balloon dogs are some of the most recognizable modern art iconography. The piece was included for that reason (and permitted by the artist’s team per the movie’s credits), and the beheading reads as a slight dig. Koons is somewhat famously controversial for his creative methods, including hiring a small army of low-paid studio assistants to essentially make his art for him. “I’m basically the idea person,” a former studio assistant quoted him saying in an essay for the New York Times Magazine in 2012. “I’m not physically involved in the production. I don’t have the necessary abilities, so I go to the top people.” It’s far from unusual for artists of Koons’ stature to have help, and his method — known as art fabrication — isn’t that uncommon for pop artists either. (Think of Andy Warhol’s Factory.) But the degree to which he’s become a delegator has gotten loads of criticism, some that goes as far as saying that he isn’t a “real” artist.
There’s also a joke in there: Koons once described Balloon Dog as a “Trojan Horse. It holds a secret, but it’s up to you to figure out what that is.” The secret is more balloon dogs, which have a healthy market of replicas in our reality. I don’t think the filmmakers are saying “eat dirt, Jeff Koons” in this moment, but decapitating one of the most famous pieces of modern art by a guy as polarizing as Koons does feel like a quick dunk on the work the art world venerates for reasons far outside their technical impressiveness. And only in the movies can one realize something as silly as destroying an insanely expensive piece of art with no repercussions, amongst everything else Across the Spider-Verse accomplishes in leaping through portals to new worlds. (Though the timing is amazingly serendipitous: Someone accidentally knocked over and shattered one of the balloon dogs at an art fair recently.)
By the end of the fight with the Vulture, the Guggenheim is reduced to a pile of rubble, to which a bystander remarks, “Is this a Banksy?” Again, it’s not that the movie is denigrating Banksy as an artist — Banksy already did a purposeful self-own in the 2010 documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, directed by the artist himself — but it is a joke about the kinds of stunts that the anonymous British street artist has conditioned us to accept as art. If he can shred a piece of framed art immediately after it was sold at Sotheby’s for $1.4 million (and re-sold a few years later for $25.4 million), why wouldn’t he raze the Guggenheim?
Choosing to stage the showdown at the Guggenheim versus, say, The Met or MoMA, seems mostly like a matter of recognizability and architectural convenience. The building, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and which took 15 years to complete, stands out on its New York City block, and the six-story spiral gallery up to its skylight is a great location to plan out a soaring action sequence against an airborne villain. But it’s worth noting how the filmmakers chose to depict the interior: It’s dim and gray inside, which makes the bright character designs of the Spider-People pop and sets a certain tone about the stuffiness of the art establishment.
When Gwen sets off through the portal with her new Spidey-mentors, it’s inviting the rest of us to join her in showcasing the potential of animation as an artform. Just as art can be kept behind glass in museums and institutions, it can also be an accessible, dazzling spectacle on a movie screen that takes viewers on an emotional and action-packed journey across dimensions. And isn’t it way more fun that way?
For more on the film, check out all the Spideys in Across the Spider-Verse or read up on Andy Samberg's weird Spider-Man from the movie, Ben Reilly. You can dig in on our Spider-Verse ending explained or why Spider-Verse succeeds and Fast X fails. Or vote on your favorite Spider-Verse character in the sequel by heading over to our Across the Spider-Verse Face-Off.
source https://www.ign.com/articles/spider-man-across-the-spider-verse-has-some-things-to-say-about-art