WalMart Culture: Stuffed And Mounted

Rebecca Solnit has a wonderful piece at Truth Out, entitled "The Wal-Mart Biennale"about the purchase of Durand's "Kindred Spirits", a painting celebrating the friendship of Cole and Bryant set in the Catskill mountains, by Alice Walton for the Wal-Mart museum. Now certainly the puchase of a painting by a wealthy family is far from newsworthy, but perhaps what disturbs us is the irony of the fact that the painting is regarded as a celebration of nature and balance. Something that seems in contrast to the earth-pillaging tradition of the Walton family. Comparing this to the 'greenimagery' of Big Oil while they simultaneously fund researchers whose purpose is to deny their heinous footprints, Solnit articulates this irony well:(truncated)

"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. "

Now the criticism is certainly not of Walton's right to buy the painting, nor can we minimize the role of the wealthy in support for the arts. Certainly our history is filled with examples of art commissioned, supported, or collected by the wealthy who did not necessarily acquire their wealth in the most honorable ways. But consider the way Wal Mart as a corporation treats it's employees and the scams perpetrated against taxpayers:

"...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). "


In the spirit of Corruptco. Blogfest 2006, I will focus on corporate images and conservation. At Coalition For A Republican Free America, I hope to post about the relationships of corporate behavior to social services and the common struggles of the American family. Please consider the theme at your blog, and what might interest you.