Founded by Walt Disney in the early 1960s from the merger of the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music and Chouinard Art Institute, California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) has become one of the most influential centers of esthetic discourse in the United States. Through its close alignment with Conceptualism and Post-Structural inquiry—particularly under the aegis of faculty luminaries such as Michael Asher, Allan Kaprow, John Baldessari, and Doug Huebler—the school has produced a generation of artists to whom issues of textuality, appropriation, and institutional reification are less ideological