Free Republic

BENTONVILLE, Ark. -- When Alice Walton, the Wal-Mart heiress and second richest woman in America, decided to build a Museum of American Art in her hometown deep in the Arkansas Ozarks, no one questioned her ability to spend money. Her daddy, Sam Walton, had left her a lot of it. Forbes puts her worth at $34.9 billion. What they questioned, expressed with bicoastal sneer and snark, was her ability to know what she was getting for daddy's money. When she called the museum "Crystal Bridges," commemorating a natural stream to be traversed on bridges leading visitors to the art,...

THERE are plenty of people rooting for this latest Whitney Biennial, hoping it recalibrates the image of the art world as something other than youth-besotted and money-obsessed. It's a start, just barely. I imagine it will provoke much head scratching by uninitiated visitors. This typically huge exhibition is very much an insider's affair, a hermetic take on what has been making waves. It will seem old hat to aficionados and inscrutable to many others. Maybe it's impossible, or impossible for the Whitney, to do a show today that doesn't seem beholden to fashion and, for art world types, familiar. Francesco...

It's known as one of the world's best private art collections, and a Tuscaloosa multimillionaire wants to share itArt for all to see Sunday, January 23, 2005 THOMAS SPENCERNews staff writer Retired from his family business, Gulf States Paper Co., multimillionaire Jack Warner, 87, often can be found wearing tennis shoes, sitting in a red leather chair in the midst of his collection of masterpieces at the Warner-Westervelt Museum on the rocky cliffs overlooking Lake Tuscaloosa. There are patriot portraits, frontier landscapes, Old West and Civil War battle scenes, and Impressionist idylls, painted by the greatest American artists: James Peale,...