More Like That (2)

A shock wave is rippling across the art world in America. The small community of Bentonville, Arkansas, population 35,000, is in the process of accumulating for exhibition one of the most significant collections of American art anywhere in the world.

And the high-brow keepers of the keys of art are up in arms.

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art will open in November. According to Rick Jervis, writing in USAToday, its $800 million endowment is four times that of the renowned Whitney Museum in New York City (“Walton-backed museum sends ripples across USA,” August 16, 2011).The museum will consist of eight buildings sprawling over 200,000 square feet, “nestled in a wooded area at the eastern edge” of Bentonville. The initial collection will feature “500 paintings and sculptures, from the Colonial period to the present day.”

Alice Walton, one of the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, is the visionary and primary mover and shaker of this effort. According to Mr. Jervis, “Alice Walton’s acquisition of some of the country’s most important pieces of American art, and the fact that they will soon hang in this rural corner of middle America, have rattled the art world.” For example, art critic Michael Kimmelman likened “Walton’s purchase of Asher B. Durand’s Kindred Spirits through a sealed auction from the New York Public Library for $35 million…to the destruction of the Penn Station.”

Heavens!

Ms. Walton’s attempt to purchase Philadelphia’s most famous work of native art, Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic, threw the Philadelphia art community into a panic and forced them to raise $68 million in order to keep the work in Philly. The event, Jervis reports, “sent shivers through the Philadelphia art community.”

Lindsey Pollock, editor of Art in America magazine, applauds Ms. Walton’s “very bold moves.” Backers and locals are elated about the idea of bringing serious art to northwest Arkansas. Why, they reason, should the best art in the world be held hostage by the art establishment in big cities?

Why, indeed?

The Crystal Bridges Museum will be free to the public and is expected to draw 200,000 visitors a year. I'm willing to wager there will be more than that.

Who would ever have thought to bring the finest in America’s impressive collection of native art to a new museum in the Boston Mountains of northwest Arkansas? Only the daughter of the man who, from a single store front in the 1950s envisioned and built the largest retail chain in the world.

The world needs more visionaries like Alice Walton. The Church needs more visionaries like her.

Yeah, I wish I could be more like that.

Related texts: Romans 12.1, 2; 2 Corinthians 10.3-5; Ephesians 3.20; Philippians 4.13

A conversation starter: "How does a person get a vision for a project as utterly novel and vast as the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas?"

T. M. Moore, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.