This past weekend, it was hard to escape the feeling that most of the art world showed up on our doorstep to help celebrate the gala reopening of the Walker Art Center. This had the feeling of a truly remarkable moment—an acknowledged world-class art center turns its operating volume up to eleven.
It is not enough, in these loud times, to merely toot your own horn to achieve this kind of harmonic convergence. You must call in your markers, and judging from the guest lists, the turn-out, the general commotion emanating from Vineland Place, the Walker people could not be better connected. This morning, we are counting ourselves lucky to associate ourselves with them. (Together with the Minnesota Book Awards—where our own Jennifer Vogel received heavy metal in the memoir category for “Flim-Flam Man,” hurray!—we feel mighty proud to be so close to the center of the universe.)
It’s important for patrons of the arts to celebrate their besieged communities. And if we occasionally seem immodest about it, well—you only get a fifty million dollar art-center addition once a generation. On the other hand, we found this story about the return of legendary graffiti artist “Revs” a very interesting counterpoint indeed. Speaking with friends here from New York, we ran through the paces of our usual arguments about the tension between, say, the paintings of Sigmar Polke (so good to see again!) and the sculpture of Claes Oldenberg (uh…)—the latter showing many signs of incipient childishness, commercialism, and general superficiality for several decades now. So few successful artists actually have the courage to continue to evolve, even after they’ve become the art world’s equivalent of rock stars. It’s not clear why this must always be the case—although we now have a pet theory that says artists are lousy money-handlers, and desperation is the single biggest ingredient in the recastable mold.
Anyway, the point of the Times piece on Revs resurgence is that it is very refreshing to transcend the normal boundaries of media-PR-self-promotion, and discover an honest-to-god outsider artist who relishes his outsider status, uses it to resist the corrupting influence of money and celebrity. Perhaps the answer is as simple as unionizing all visual artists (after teaching them how to work steel). We have no truck with the romanticism of the “starving artist,” but we also don’t have a lot of patience with the overfed artist, either.
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