From the WSJ "The family of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton pledged to give $800 million to his daughter Alice Walton's new art museum in Arkansas, the largest cash donation ever made to a U.S. art museum.
The gift from the Walton Family Foundation trumps the $660 million in oil stocks that J. Paul Getty bequeathed to his namesake Los Angeles museum more than three decades ago. It's also larger than the roughly $500 million cash gift that Texas philanthropist Caroline Wiess Law bequeathed to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.Donations of artworks to museums, such as Walter Annenberg's bequest to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, also have been valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars.The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.The collection ranges over the nation's artistic history, including Gilbert Stuart's 1797 portrait of George Washington.
The gift reflects the outsized ambitions the retail-chain family has for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, a complex of eight gallery pavilions it has helped build around a pair of ponds in the company's northwestern Arkansas hometown of Bentonville (population 35,301). The museum, designed by architect Moshe Safdie, is named for a nearby spring and its bridge-like architectural elements.
The 201,000 square-foot museum, which opens to the public Nov. 11, aims to chronicle the entire story of American art from the Colonial era of the late 1600s to contemporary pieces made by American artists a few months ago—an encyclopedic sweep reminiscent of the ambitions of the robber-baron museum builders in the Gilded Age, but rarely attempted by new museums today. Billionaire Eli Broad, for example, has pledged nearly $340 million to build and endow a new museum for his collection in Los Angeles, but his vast holdings only cover the past few decades of U.S. and international art." ( the rest )
Yes, that title is a horrible stereotype of Arkansans, and I am somewhat ashamed of myself. I just think that a bazillion trillion dollars to put important art in a most un-accessible place in America is thinking a bit much of ones self. That is all. But hey, this is AMERICA, and she can do with ALL that Walmart money what she wants. Hey, it is a very nice gesture, these paintings could be hanging in her bathroom.... The Walton Wing of the National Gallery or the Met might have been nice thought.
I really am not knocking Arkansas. My favorite person living in Arkansas sent me this photo this week.
1 comment:
I could see the point in locating the museum in a larger town, for example, Little Rock, but...I'm happy to see it in Bentonville too.
Here's the thing: New York and DC and most large cities have museums, lots of them. Here in Arkansas, the closest collections of any note are all a minimum of 5 - 6 hours away. People in this part of the country don't typically make it to New York and DC all that often. It doesn't mean that they don't want to see art collections - but it costs a lot to get to them and so they typically don't.
Of interesting note, for quite a few years Memphis was getting various corporate sponsors to underwrite bringing special collections like Ramses the Great, Napoleon, Treasures of the Chinese Tombs, Catherine the Great, to Memphis. Every one of those shows had higher attendance in Memphis than they did in any other city. Which kind of indicates that there is thirst in this cultural desert here. Those Memphis shows were drawing people from TN, AR, MO, MS, probably AL, LA, KY & southern IL as well. This new museum will draw people from OK, KS, MO, AR & probably TN, LA & TX as well - people who have never had a world-class art museum within driving distance.
We deserve to have some nice things too, I guess is my take on it.
Then there's the political angle - Alice Walton left NW Arkansas pretty much in disgrace, after an altercation with a cop resulting from a DUI stop in which the "don't you know who I AM?" card failed to achieve the desired result. I can see why she'd want to supplant that last impression with a much more generous one.
Post a Comment