Wal-Mart Art Patronage as Money Laundering
Gandalf Grey
Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch
It isn't that, when Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton purchased Asher B.
Durand's 1849 painting Kindred Spirits last year, she got the state of
Arkansas to pass legislation specifically to save her taxes -- in this case,
about $3 million on a purchase price of $35 million. It isn't that the
world's second richest woman and ninth richest person (according to a Forbes
magazine 2005 estimate) scooped the painting out from under the National
Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which had banded together to try
to keep it in a public collection when the New York Public Library decided
to sell it off.
It isn't that Walton will eventually stick this talisman of New England
cultural life and a lot of other old American paintings in the Crystal
Bridges Museum of American Art, the Walton family museum she's building in
Bentonville, Arkansas, the site of Wal-Mart's corporate headquarters --
after all people in the middle of the country should get to see some good
art too. It might not even be, as Wal-MartWatch.com points out, that the
price of the painting equals what the state of Arkansas spends every two
years providing for Wal-Mart's 3,971 employees on public assistance; or that
the average Wal-Mart cashier makes $7.92 an hour and, since Wal Mart likes
to keep people on less than full-time schedules, works only 29 hours a week
for an annual income of $11,948--so a Wal-Mart cashier would have to work a
little under 3,000 years to earn the price of the painting without taking
any salary out for food, housing, or other expenses (and a few hundred more
years to pay the taxes, if the state legislature didn't exempt our
semi-immortal worker).
The trouble lies in what the painting means and what Alice Walton and her
$18 billion mean. Art patronage has always been a kind of money-laundering,
a pretty public face for fortunes made in uglier ways. The superb
Rockefeller folk art collections in several American museums don't include
paintings of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre of miners in Colorado, carried out by
Rockefeller goons, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles doesn't say a
thing about oil. But something about Wal-Mart and Kindred Spirits is more
peculiar than all the robber barons and their chapels, galleries, and
collections ever were, perhaps because, more than most works of art,
Durand's painting is a touchstone for a set of American ideals that Wal-Mart
has been savaging.
It may be true that, in an era when oil companies regularly take out
advertisements proclaiming their commitment to environmentalism, halting
global warming, promoting petroleum alternatives, and conservation measures,
while many of them also fund arguments against climate change's very
existence, nothing is too contrary to embrace. But Kindred Spirits is older,
more idealistic, and more openly at odds with this age than most hostages to
multinational image-making.
Kindred Spirits portrays Durand's friend, the great American landscape
painter Thomas Cole, with his friend, the poet and editor William Cullen
Bryant. The two stand on a projecting rock above a cataract in the
Catskills, bathed like all the trees and air around them in golden light.
The painting is about friendship freely given, including a sense of
friendship, even passion, for the American landscape itself. In the work of
Cole, Durand, and Bryant, as in the writing of Henry David Thoreau and Walt
Whitman, you can see an emerging belief that the love of nature, beauty,
truth, and freedom are naturally allied, a romantic vision that still
lingers as one of the most idealistic versions of what it might mean to be
an American.
Cole was almost the first American painter to see the possibilities in
American landscapes, to see that meaning could grow rather than lessen in a
place not yet full of ruins and historical associations, and so he became an
advocate for wilderness nearly half a century before California rhapsodist
and eventual Sierra Club cofounder John Muir took up the calling. Bryant had
gained a reputation as a poet before he became editor-in-chief of the New
York Evening Post and thereby a pivotal figure in the culture of the day. He
defended a group of striking tailors in 1836, long before there was a union
movement, and was ever after a champion of freedom and human rights, turning
his newspaper into an antislavery mouthpiece and eventually becoming a
founder of the Republican Party (back when that was the more progressive and
less beholden of the two parties). He was an early supporter of Abraham
Lincoln and of the projects that resulted in New York's Central Park and the
Metropolitan Museum -- of a democratic urban culture that believed in the
uplifting power of nature and of free access. Maybe the mutation of the
Republican Party from Bryant's to Walton's time is measure enough of
American weirdness; or maybe the details matter, of what the painting is and
what Wal-Mart and its heiress are.
Kindred Spirits was commissioned by the wealthy dry-goods merchant Jonathan
Sturges as a gift for Bryant in commemoration of his beautiful eulogy for
Cole, who died suddenly in 1848. Bryant left it to his daughter Julia, who
gave it in 1904 to what became the New York Public Library. It was never a
commodity exchanged between strangers until the Library, claiming financial
need, put it and other works of art up for sale. So now a portrait of
antislavery and wilderness advocates belongs to a woman whose profits came
from degrading working conditions in the U.S. and abroad and from ravaging
the North American landscape.
Maybe the problem is that the Crystal Bridges museum seems like a false
front for Wal-Mart, a made-in-America handicrafted artifact of idealism for
a corporation that is none of the above. The museum will, as such
institutions do, attempt to associate the Wal-Mart billionaires with high
culture, American history, beautifully crafted objects -- a host of ideals
and pleasures a long way from what you find inside the blank, slabby box of
a Wal-Mart. One of the privileges of wealth is buying yourself out of the
situation you help to make, so that the wealthy, who advocate for
deregulation, install water purifiers and stock up on cases of Perrier, or
advocate for small government and then hire their own security forces and
educators.
Walton, it seems safe to assume, lives surrounded by nicer objects, likely
made under nicer conditions, than she sells the rest of us. I have always
believed that museums love artists the way taxidermists love deer. Perhaps
Alice Walton is, in some sense, stuffing and mounting what is best about
American culture -- best and fading. Perhaps Crystal Bridges will become one
of the places we can go to revisit the long history that precedes
industrialization and globalization, when creation and execution were not so
savagely sundered, when you might know the maker of your everyday goods, and
making was a skilled and meaningful act. One of the pleasures of most visual
art is exactly that linkage between mind and hand, lost elsewhere as acts of
making are divided among many and broken down into multiple repetitive
tasks.
Perhaps she could build us the Museum of When Americans Made Stuff Locally
by Hand for People They Knew or perhaps that's what Crystal Bridges, along
with the rest of such institutions, will become. Or Walton could just plan
to open the Museum of When Americans Made Stuff at some more distant date,
though less than half of what's in Wal-Mart, sources inform me, is still
actually made here -- for now. The world's richest woman, however, seems
more interested in archaic images of America than in the artisanry behind
them.
Walton has already scooped up a portrait of George Washington by Charles
Wilson Peale and paintings by Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper for her
museum. That museum, reports say, will feature many, many nineteenth-century
portraits of Native Americans -- but it would be hard to see her as a
champion of the indigenous history of the Americas. The Wal-Mart that opened
last November in Teotihuacan, near Mexico City, is built so close to the
Aztec's Pyramid of the Sun that many consider the site desecrated. The
Wal-Mart parking lot actually eradicated the site of a smaller temple. "This
is the flag of conquest by global interests, the symbol of the destruction
of our culture," said a local schoolteacher. Thanks to free-trade measures
like NAFTA, Wal-Mart has become Mexico's biggest retailer and private-sector
employer.
Imagine if Walton were more like Sturges, supporting the art of her time.
Imagine if she were supporting artists who actually had something to say
about Wal-Mart and America (and Mexico, and China). Imagine if, in the mode
of the Venice Biennale or the Sao Paolo Biennale, there was a Wal-Mart
biennale. After all, Wal-Mart is itself China's seventh-largest trading
partner, ahead of Germany and Russia and Italy; if it were a nation, it
would be the world's nineteenth biggest economy. If it's on the same scale
as those countries, why shouldn't it have its own contemporary art shows?
But what would the Wal-Mart nation and its artists look like?
Rather than the open, luminous, intelligent architecture Moshe Safde will
probably bestow on Bentonville, Arkansas, imagine a shuttered Wal-Mart big
box (of which there are so many, often shut down simply to stop employees
from unionizing) turned into a MOCA, a museum of contemporary art, or better
yet a MOCWA, a Museum of Contemporary Wal-Mart Art. Or Wal-Art. After all,
Los Angeles's MOCA was originally sited in a defunct warehouse. You could
set the artists free to make art entirely out of materials available at
Wal-Mart, or to make art about the global politics of Wal-Mart in our
time -- poverty, consumerism, sprawl, racism, gender discrimination,
exploitation of undocumented workers.
Imagine a contemporary artist, maybe with Adobe Photoshop, reworking Kindred
Spirits again and again. Imagine that Cole and Bryant are, this time,
standing not on a rocky outcropping but in, say, one of the puzzle and
art-supply aisles of a Wal-Mart somewhere in the Catskills, dazed and
depressed. Or imagine instead that it's some sweatshop workers, a little
hunched and hungry, on that magnificent perch amid the foliage and the
golden light, invited at last into some sense of democratic community.
Imagine paintings of Edward Hopper's old downtowns, boarded up because all
the sad and lonely people are shopping at Wal-Mart and even having their
coffee and hot dogs there. Imagine video-portraits of the people who
actually make the stuff you can buy at Wal-Mart, or of the African-American
truck-drivers suing the corporation for racism or of the women who are lead
plaintiffs in the nation's largest class-action suit for discrimination.
Against Wal-Mart, naturally.
Imagine if Alice Walton decided to follow the route of Target with architect
Michael Graves and commissioned some cutting-edge contemporary art about
these issues: videos and DVDs you could buy, prints for your walls,
performance art in the aisles, art that maybe even her workers could afford.
Imagine if Wal-Mart would acknowledge what Wal-Mart is rather than turning
hallowed American art into a fig leaf to paste over naked greed and raw
exploitation. But really, it's up to the rest of us to make the Museum of
Wal-Mart, one way or another, in our heads, on our websites, or in our
reading of everyday life everywhere.
Rebecca Solnit's Tomdispatch-generated Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories,
Wild Possibilities is out in a new and expanded edition. Her other recent
books include A Field Guide to Getting Lost and, with Mark Klett and Byron
Wolfe, Yosemite in Time: Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, Ghost Rivers.
Copyright 2005 Rebecca Solnit
Source: TomDispatch
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=60904
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
--Thomas Jefferson