Before you read a single word, click on the youtube link above to see some magic.
This is Nick Cave. He graduated with a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute, earned an MFA from Cranbrook Art Institute and danced with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. He continues to study, teach, create and perform. Someone wrote that he straddles dance and visual art; that his art is bizarre, brash and beautiful; that Cave blurs all lines between the sensory experiences brought about through sound, color and performance.
I think he is purely magical.
Last Friday, a Nick Cave installation opened in the 30,000 square feet “Room 5” space at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibit will be on view for awhile - a year at least - but I’m taking no chances. I’m going to North Adams next week expressly to view/experience this installation.
I’ve written before how MassMoCA changed the dynamics in the previously dying mill town of North Adams, Mass. I am witness: I will make a reservation in a nearby inn for two nights, spend money in accessible restaurants, and possibly do a little shopping. In past visits, I’ve seen live performance in MassMoCA’s “Black Box Theater” and certainly will stop again at the newly constructed Clark Museum in nearby Williamstown.
Let’s not pretend that one wonderful cultural addition to a previously deserted corner changed western Massachusetts into a travelers’ mecca similar to Paris/London/FLORIDA! Or that a museum can replace the hundreds of jobs lost when factories or mines close. Plenty of reminders of poverty remain around the Berkshires just as surely as they do around the Adirondacks or Appalachia.
But it can go a long way! Bentonville, Arkansas, in addition to Crystal Bridges Art Museum plans a “MassMoCA-esque” in nearby abandoned factory buildings and Tulsa, Oklahoma, is allocating tax money for improved cultural ties to help create an “Art Corridor” between Bentonville and Tulsa. I remind you that this is the heart of conservative USA where the mantra is “government is no damned good/taxes too damned high.”
I didn’t like Crystal Bridges….it seemed too-too….too new, too forced, too instant money. But I’ll go back someday mostly to see how it has settled in, if surrounding areas look improved and to see the factory-turned-contemporary-installation-art-museum in Bentonville.
Meanwhile….NICK CAVE!!! HERE WE COME!!
