The Full Nelson

Nelson-Atkins Director Marc Wilson on all things art in K.C.

Monday, April 7, 2008

It’s springtime, reader, and what better time to go for a visit to a fine art museum?

Marc Wilson, director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art since 1982, was kind enough to sit with lawrence.com and share his thoughts on Kansas City’s changing downtown, the community of working artists in K.C. and the best mental approach to bring to an art museum.

What effect will the Power & Light District have on the Crossroads? Will it spell the end of the K.C. art scene as we now know it, in place of 11 blocks of Famous Daves?

Marc Wilson: The Crossroads has a real constituency of people who come there for that particular experience. They are a niche unto themselves. That’s different, in my view, from the entertainment center. The entertainment center is a very hothouse item. You’re going there for food, for all these other things. It’s around the Sprint arena, so the activity tends to be pumped up when there’s something going on at the arena. It lacks the consistency and the dedicated market that the Crossroads has, so I don’t think that the entertainment center’s necessarily going to conflict.

Submitted photo

Nelson-Atkins director Marc Wilson.

What it might do that would be negative is to raise property values in the Crossroads area. That would raise the costs for the galleries so they can’t afford it, and that would, in turn, force them to go to another location. If you really look at the entertainment district, the kind of business that are there, they’re all restaurants. For the most part, they’re chain restaurants. They’re not exactly unique. I think the Crossroads offers you something unique. You really get the flavor and the character of the people who are running those businesses.

The Power & Light District seems awfully similar to The Legends in Kansas City, Kan., and Zona Rosa in Kansas City, North.

It’s a very artificially composed, formulaic thing. Those things always feel that way. Zona Rosa is an artificial old city. We’re in the post-mall period, and so what do you do? You go in and you take 50, 60 acres, you put some streets there and you make all the storefronts different so it looks like an old-fashioned city—they’re not old-fashioned, I guess they’re the new fashion—and you make them look individualized, personalized and so forth, but they’re the same national chains.

Submitted by the Nelson-Atkins

The new addition to the Nelson-Atkins.

It’s an interesting mix in that area, because the Crossroads District is still growing, and now you have this infusion of stuff in the Power & Light District.

I think the two are worlds apart, because one is based on proven commercial corporate formula and the other is built up from a more grassroots thing. That’s why the Crossroads has more personality. Hate to say it, but you can find Power & Light restaurants everywhere. The virtue of them is you know what you’re going to get. It’s like going to McDonalds. There’s no experimentation.

We’ll see. The only thing that could hurt is if the land values change and if Kansas City decides to raise taxes, which is what they’re trying to do. They see it coming back, they want more money, so they raise taxes. That makes it more expensive, and that has a way of depressing the very thing that Kansas City wants, which is to build the urban core.

If it gets priced out, then you go to the West Bottoms. The West Bottoms is isolated. That’s the other problem. It’s not that you can’t get there, but there’s no synergy with anything else. You can go to the Crossroads and then you can quickly pop down to some other place. You could go further downtown, you could go a little east to Arthur Bryant’s and get some good barbecue, you could go south five minutes to the Plaza. The West Bottoms, if you want to go someplace else, it’s just a little bit more of a trip. But it’s there and it’s begging for development. It’s obvious.

How do you think Kansas City’s scene of working artists compares to other cities?

It is amazing to me that a city of Kansas City’s size has the breadth and the intensity of our activity. It’s absolutely amazing. There’s as much going on in Kansas City as there is in Houston. Not as much as Chicago, but, when you think about it, an incredible amount if you go across the arts—the visual arts, performing arts.

The growth of the Crossroads is a very, very important component. What makes Kansas City different, let’s say, from Cleveland—Cleveland has fantastic arts organizations, the Cleveland Symphony is one of the great symphonies in the country, the Cleveland Art Museum is probably better than the Chicago Art Institute, it’s got the third-biggest public library system, it’s got one thing after the next—but for all of that, Cleveland doesn’t have the magic of Kansas City’s art scene. One of the big differences is artists living, working, producing in the community. Artists need other artists. So you need a community of artists to sustain a community of artists. It’s kind of chicken and egg. But once it’s there, it can grow. That is, to me, one of the things that catalyzes the Kansas City scene and makes it so interesting.

If you go to places like Minneapolis, St. Louis, Denver, you’ll not find the large art scene that there is in Kansas City. That’s why Kansas City’s art scene is really lively and different. It’s not just institutions. And then the interaction of artists and institutions is good.

We did a survey a few years ago: There are 10,000 artists—I’m talking seriously, I’m not talking commercial artists—trying to make a living on art in Kansas City. There are over 200 galleries. It’s amazing. Now, they come and go. A real artist has to do their art, and we have a lot of them. We employ, at the Nelson, a lot of artists. They come work for us during the day so they can pay the rent, buy their groceries, they go home at night, and they’ve got to work.

A visit to an art museum can seem like a chore. Any advice?

Treat it like impulse shopping. You don’t have to go for an event—just impulse. “I want to see some great shit. I want to get turned on.” That’s where most people make a mistake. They spend too much time. They get in what I call “safari mode.” Don’t do it. Take more time, stop and look carefully. Just like music. Now, there’s music you play as background—you might have some music going on your computer while you’re doing something else. But a lot of times, if you go to a concert and you’re seriously listening to something, you’ll really concentrate on it. You have to do the same thing with the visual side. Don’t see so much. Hour-and-a-half. Go see something that’s familiar, something you already know a little bit about and you know you like it, and then go see something that’s unfamiliar. You’ll discover things.

You also have to give the art a chance. You’ve got to try to engage, be open-minded and spend some time looking. “Why does this painting have punch? Why does this thing leap off the wall at me?” Try to ask that question. If you listen to the same piece of music over and over again, you’ll hear more than you did the first time. You’ll get the nuances, how the different tones and melodies interact. Same thing with art, only it’s visual. That’s where people need to slow down, take time, look at it as a composition, look at the visual language, just as you listen to the musical language when you listen to a song. People try to overdo it. The say, “I’m going to see the whole Nelson.” Oh my God, the Nelson’s way too big. You can’t do that. «

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The Full Nelson

Nelson-Atkins Director Marc Wilson on all things art in K.C.

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