The Crude Aesthetic of Collective Grief
It’s Donald Duck, and it isn’t. A bust of the cartoon character sat on a pedestal in Susan Bowers’ exhibition, “The Aura and Rootedness: Hardcore,” at the Clay Center of New Orleans last month, easily recognizable in his jaunty blue sailor hat, red bowtie, and tight-beaked grimace. But something was off. Many things were off.
The surface of Donald Duck is not smooth like fine pottery or celluloid; it’s chunky and rough. His proportions and color are off as well: The beak is yellow but not the right yellow. The clay is not glazed but painted with matte acrylic, depriving the surface of glossy, eye-pleasing material. It’s almost as if the sculpture wants to be unattractive. I posted an image of Donald Duck in a weekly art diary I publish on Substack (disconola.substack.com), and in response, someone sent me a message asking for my thoughts on the notion of skill in art, implying that this artwork lacked much evidence of it.
When is “My kid sister could make that” a valid critique and when is it irrelevant? Looking at work in an art exhibition, I presume everything is deliberate, that the artist had full control over subject and material. If an artwork looks crude, I assume it’s intentional. (That said, a brutal aesthetic—or any other stylized approach—will lose me if the work appears contrived, derivative, or lazy.) It’s also worth remembering that an artist must live with their own work. If their work is “ugly” they are choosing to spend hours with that ugliness. When an artist like Bowers can make “pretty” things but chooses to make work that appears crude, it points to intended meaning.
Can a mash-up of recognizable imagery and a roughed-up aesthetic express something profound? For me it can, and it did. The skills at play in Donald Duck are not technical skills; she uses an anti-skill approach to solicit an emotional response. For me that emotion was something like grief.
In the sculpture, Donald Duck has teeth visible on the sides of his beak. Ducks don’t have teeth, but the Disney character occasionally bares some, usually as an expression of frustration or rage. Across the sculpture’s long, white throat, there is a reddish-purple gash. It’s subtle but brutal. Unlike the more popular, upbeat Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck is characterized by frustration, a short temper, and garbled speech. Maybe the grief feeling comes from seeing this already downtrodden character even worse off than I remember him.
On a neurological level, it feels good to recognize things. This is known as the Familiarity Principle. Shared pop cultural imagery gives us a sense that we are interconnected, that we belong to something larger than ourselves. When a familiar character is tampered with, the pleasure of recognition is mixed with discomfort and low-key anxiety.
Kjelshus Collins, another New Orleans-based ceramicist, works with a similar vocabulary. His Couch Gag #1 shows the family from the iconic TV series The Simpsons posed on their red couch in front of a TV. While I immediately identify what I’m looking at—Homer, Marge, Lisa, Maggie, and Bart—what I actually see is a row of five pinched forms without facial features or defined limbs. The couch and TV are smooth and precisely articulated, heightening the sense of brutality with which the figures were formed. The fact that these are readable as figures, let alone recognized as characters is part of tension in the piece, and familiarity becomes an integral component of the work, one that resides partly in the work and partly within the viewer.
The tableau of figures on the couch references the second-to-last scene of the opening credits known as the “couch gag,” variations of the roughly three-second clip of the family converging on the couch before the final shot of the opening sequence. The final shot, the TV from the family’s POV, shows the last credits, rendering the viewer “part of the family.” This sculpture, like Donald Duck, like any artwork that references the language of recognizable animation, is an inside joke. In the canon of contemporary art there are a lot of inside jokes that reference other artworks; these reference the readily available art of pop culture.
The Simpsons has been on the air for 36 seasons, making it the longest running series in TV history, reflecting all the American archetypes—the working class family, cynical and ambitious children, wealthy businessmen, suck-ups, and politicians. It has also predicted the future. In an episode titled “Bart to the Future” that aired in 2000, Lisa is president. She is shown in the Oval Office saying, “As you know, we have inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump. How bad is it…?”
I saw the sculpture Couch Gag #1 for the first time just over a year ago. Frankly, it looks different to me now. The Familiarity Principle is joined by a feeling of deflation. When I look at the Simpsons family in their choppy, damaged state it feels very 2025. I’m projecting, but this is the way art is open-ended and subjective. Culture gives us collective experience and collective memory, but it does not guarantee we live in a unified or consistent reality.
So when there are sculptures out there that exhibit skill and beauty, in language that existed long before Disney, why do I want to look at busted-looking cartoon characters and why do I want to defend the “skill” it takes to merge these languages? In this moment, the aesthetic of crude, rough-edged pop culture imagery feels relevant and prerequisites of technical skill, fixation on traditional methods, and suspicion of less pretty personal expression, is, as they say, “a vibe” and it’s not a good one. Many of history’s favorite fascists have promoted the idea that art must be “traditional,” “beautiful,” and “classical.”
Animated characters in their screen-lit environments enjoy a neat 2D world that glows from within. When they are rendered in clay, an earthy, full-bodied material, they become breakable, imperfect, closer to us, their viewers. This aesthetic, pushed to the degree it is in these works, is deeply funny or deeply sad. Or both. It’s a mix of innocence and violence—or at the very least, a lack of care. Pop nostalgia and the audacity of personal expression is our American brand, our love and grief language, and in certain moments like this one, it gets to me.
Top photo by Emily Farranto: Susan Bowers, Donald Duck
Bottom photo courtesy Sibyl Gallery: Kjelshus Collins, Couch Gag #1
