![]() ![]() “We make things you can’t buy, that you can’t really document.” “We work collectively,” says Caity Kennedy, one of the members of the Meow Wolf collective. They also enjoyed that they were outsiders whom the more staid art galleries in Santa Fe shunned, since they didn’t produce art that could be sold. They delighted in collecting trash (since they couldn’t afford traditional art materials) and turning the trash into art. They managed to pool money from their day jobs to rent a 900-square-foot former hair salon, which they turned into an art project. “I was always coming up with ambitious things to try to sell to someone.”Ībout half a dozen artists all ended up in Santa Fe and decided to form Meow Wolf. The company’s CEO, Vince Kadlubek, said in a documentary about Meow Wolf that when he was in high school a decade ago he tried to get his teachers to let him work on independent art projects. The group was a bunch of artistic types who all ended up in Santa Fe. I have not fully understood what tax advantages a B-corporation has over traditional corporations, but I accept that Meow Wolf thinks of themselves as a social enterprise. They started off life as an LLC but are now a B-corporation. Meow Wolf offers “immersive experiences.” They currently have an installation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and they are going to have branches in Las Vegas in 2020 and in Denver in 2021, followed, at some point, by a branch in Washington. But is it possible to create art without relying on patrons? Rachel Monroe offers an alternative in her New York Times Magazine profile, of the artists’ collective Meow Wolf. But they also say that new donor agreements will limit naming rights to 20 years. The Smithsonian, to their credit, has said they are not changing the name of the Sackler Museum because the agreement they made with Sackler said the name would be “the Sackler Museum” in perpetuity. Arthur Sackler’s widow, Dame Jillian Sackler, forcibly makes this point in this Washington Post op-ed. ![]() Part of the problem is that there are two generations of Sacklers, and patriarch Arthur Sackler, whose best-known donation is the Sackler Museum that’s part of the Smithsonian, didn’t have anything to do with Oxycontin, which was created a decade after his death in 1987. I’ve been accumulating clips about the Sacklers for some time, but there are too many developments to write about them. A minor issue has been the recent resignation of Warren Kanders, who owns companies that make tear gas and bullets, from the Whitney Museum board. Here the major issue is the donations that the Sackler family-much of whose wealth comes from Oxycontin-has made to art museums. One of the more contentious topics in philanthropy today is the relationship between donors and the arts. The Meow Wolf art collective models a new approach. Recent criticisms of major donations from donors like the Sackler family raise questions about the future of funding the arts. ![]()
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