The Wal-Mart Biennale
Michael Givel
By Rebecca Solnit
TomDispatch
February 18, 2006
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.
Michael Givel
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