Tim Burton infuses LACMA’s Halloween ball

Here’s one small, unscientific bit of evidence that LACMA’s Tim Burton retrospective has drawn a different audience than the museum’s usual crowds — look at their forearms.

“I’ve seen more tattoos here in the last five months than I have in all my years at the museum,” said Jason Gaulton, coordinator of LACMA’s Muse program for younger art patrons.

On Saturday, the Burton exhibition breaks the fourth wall as it inspires Muse’s annual costume ball. This year, the Halloween ball, aimed at Muse’s audience of twenty- to fortysomething art fans, features experimental music and performance art that elaborate on the dark fairy-tale qualities of Burton’s work.

Burton’s wry pop-goth aesthetic is one of the most imaginative and idiosyncratic visions in film. LACMA’s retrospective traces Burton’s creative growth from notebook sketches to such era-defining movies as “Edward Scissorhands” and “Beetlejuice,” creating the perfect aesthetic for a costume party.

“Disciples of Burton’s philosophy know that it’s OK to live outside of ‘normal reality’,” Gaulton said. “The fears here are less real than the ones in our day-to-day lives.”

A key performer at the ball, neo-noir cabaret act Sneaky Nietzsche is the performance art aegis of Sheila Vand, composer Johann Carbajal and a cross-discipline collaboration of more than 30 L.A. artists. The act is evidence of how deeply Burton’s macabre imagery resonates in the mainstream and subcultures; the group is known for transforming its downtown industrial space into Weimar-style decadence dripping with gleeful morbidity.

The group will be joined by Killsonic, a 25-piece experimental jazz ensemble whose dark clamor and wide scope dovetail with Burton’s expansive vision, as does the costume and event collective Sypher Art Studios, a past LACMA collaborator renowned for its period-piece interactive set design.

For the Burton show’s curator, Britt Salvesen, one of the exhibition’s most rewarding aspects was watching ideas grow and translate across different media, from sketches to film to costume design and digital effects. The Muse costume ball is a natural extension of how audiences relate to Burton’s iconography. It’s also a good pathway to a younger audience.

“He’s tapped into something in culture where there’s so much pressure to be an adult, but you don’t want to let go of your childhood,” Salvesen said. “He plays both sides, and there’s such a long tradition of that in art.”

For info about the ball, go to: https://www.lacma.org.

august.brown@latimes.com