Wal-Mart’s art of shame

Jeffrey Goldberg

Bloomberg.com

Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton’s new museum may be an aesthetic success, said Jeffrey Goldberg, but “it’s also a moral tragedy.” Several paintings in the billion-dollar Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., strike me as “especially pointed commentaries” on the retailer’s baleful effect on our country and its economy. Asher B. Durand’s Kindred Spirits celebrates an American landscape that has been “systematically disfigured by thousands of hangar-sized” Wal-Mart warehouses. Norman Rockwell’s determined Rosie the Riveter brings to mind the underpaid Wal-Mart employee I once met who was living in her car. Jacob Lawrence’s Ambulance Call is “an obvious reminder” of Wal-Mart’s failure to provide its workers with basic health care.

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I don’t begrudge Alice Walton her $21 billion fortune. But I do resent her refusal to “help Wal-Mart workers, especially women, earn more money” and get affordable health insurance. To the people “whose sweat pays for her paintings,” she seems to have one response: “Let them eat art.”