A piece in following week’s Fresh Yorker will shed some blaze on Alice Walton, art collector and daughter of Walmart’s founder, Sam Walton. Her collection, to be housed in her Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art –along with its $800 million endowment– has quickly become one of the largest tales in art history. The museum, which is scheduled to open in November, is located in Bentonville, Arkansas, the same small town that houses Walmart’s headquarters, however is poised to become a major Middle America road-trip destination. Author Rebecca Mead details Walton’s journey from heiress to art market oligarch, from her $20 million night on the telephone with Sotheby’s to accolades that she “will transform our field” by the head of the American Art Department at Christie’s. Mead also considers the opposition, writing, the Waltons’ retail empire—which sold ever-cheaper goods to Americans by outsourcing jobs to labor markets overseas, by forcing the closure of small stores in downtowns across the nation, thanks to its vast hypermarkets—was denounced as antithetical to the values underlying the art that Walton was acquiring.Glance at More…
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