As a student working toward a Master in Fine Art’s in Writing, I’m involved in and present for a lot of conversations about what it, and what isn’t, art. I’ve never stopped the conversation about whatever book or movies is being talked about and see what the participants thought of action figures. Part of it is that interjecting would be rude, but another part is that I fear that most of society thinks that action figures are only for kids. I believe that they are for all ages, and are, unequivocally, art.

I will qualify my previous statement by admitting that at the lowest-rung of action figures product (I’m looking at you Marvel’s 2.5 inch movie lines with barely any articulation) are pulp on the same level as the pulp novels of the early twentieth century and comic books. Those outlets gave us Raymond Chandler and his magnificent novel The Big Sleep and Alan Moore and what I would argue is the best piece of literature of to come out of the eighties, if not the twentieth century, Watchmen.

Art, at it’s best, which the two aforementioned works are, brings the consumer (in the sense of viewer or reader, not person who spends the money on it) into a greater understanding of the world and a greater communion with their interior landscape and the people around them. Go to any toy meet and you’ll see the love these people feel for the avatars of the works they love and the people that share that love. The way a jazz concert or an art exhibit bring people together, action figures do too.

Questions and Answers

But Ryan, art can’t be fun?

False. That’s an attitude that some (but certainly not all) academics have pushed onto society in order to achieve tenure and make themselves indispensible in the interpretation and definition of art.

A brief survey of fiction that is universally consider art—Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Pastoralia by George Saunders, Birds of America by Lorrie Moore, to name a few—shows us that art can and should be fun. Even Francisco Goya, painter widely known for chronicling the Spanish Civil War, took time in between the scenes of death and gore to paint things like “Soldiers Frightened By a Phantom.”

But Ryan, these figures are being made for profit. How can they be art?

The idea of selling out has bothered me since high school. I was in a band and we were playing a three song set at a birthday party and I mentioned to a guy I went to high school with that I hated playing Green Day’s “Good Riddance” even though I’d be playing it at the party. He called me a sell out. I made $25 that weekend and his punk band played for free. We had the same amount of fun.

Everclear said it best in their song “I Will Buy You a New Life.” “I hate those people who love to tell you / money is the root of all that kills / they have never been poor.” Artists need money just like everyone else. We need to eat. We prefer to sleep under roofs. All of that cost’s money. This isn’t new. William Shakespeare wrote his plays like a pulp writer, racing to meet deadlines so that make ends meet, not as art. Alfred Hitchcock almost exclusively directed with a large budget from a studio that expected the movie to perform well financially, not artistically. Normal Rockwell didn’t paint the covers of The Saturday Evening Post for free. It’s immaterial whether Hasbro is paying a sculptor, or they’re being paid by the Globe Theater, a movie studio, or The Saturday Evening Post. They’re creating a figure that brings people into great and communion and understanding or others and themselves.

But Ryan, aren’t you worried that broadening what we view as art to action figures will necessitate acceptance of other things that aren’t traditionally categorized as art too?

I would damn well hope so. Out of the nominations for Best Picture this Year, the only film that wasn’t traditional realism (but also happened to, deservedly, win the award) was Birdman. It’s not like we haven’t had great films this year that deserved at least a nomination. The Academy, the group I would argue is most responsible for deciding which films are art and which aren’t through their nominations, missed out on Interstellar because it didn’t fit their strict idea of what a film needed to do to be a “film.” It’s nonsense. It’s nonsense to immediately throw out a great film like Interstellar because it has scifi elements in it.

I’ll end with this: there are a million definitions floating around the internet (for a list of twenty-seven I disagree with, check out this article on Mental Floss!). Art is what individuals decide it is though. In my definition, action figures makes the cut, and I hope they make yours too.

A Call to Action (Figures) is a weekly column published on Wednesdays, chronicling my rants and raves about all things action figure. Next week I’ll get off my high horse and talk about how toys like amiibos will affect the future of action figures.

Did I get it right? Should we think of actions figures as art? Let me know in the comments!