Meow Wolf

While passing through Las Vegas recently, I visited Meow Wolf (MW), which bills itself as a "transformative immersive art experience". It combines elements of night club, modern art museum, laser light show, and science museum. The first instance of MW is in Santa Fe; Vegas is the 2nd, and they're building a third in Denver.

MW was OK; I enjoyed it somewhat but wasn't transformed. But I'm interested in its significance to art and culture. MW has lofty goals - to revolutionize the world of modern art and to unleash (and monetize) creativity in general. Is this for real, or is it just another corporate scam? As Ali G asks: is it good - or is it wank?

The venue

In Vegas, MW is housed in an enormous building called Area 15 (a reference to Area 51? not sure) which includes other arty attractions. Area 15 is located in an industrial area about a mile away from the Strip. Its cavernous central atrium suggests a hip night club; it's dark and pulses with constant techno music.

Out in the parking lot, they check your ID and put a band on your wrist. You go into Area 15 atrium. The entry to MW is a supermarket stocked with ersatz "products" whose brands and descriptions mock the American food industry, but stop short of making a political statement about it.

You wander around, and soon you become aware of people emerging from unmarked doors, freezer cases, etc. These are entrances to the main exhibit area, which is a large space, maybe 200' x 80' and 50' high. It's divided into three levels with steel walkways and staircases. There are lots of passageways, alcoves, and side rooms.

The walls and ceiling are black; the space is generally dark. Medium-loud techno music plays constantly.

The exhibits

The space is full of high-tech art objects and installations. Most of them are large; some fill entire rooms. Many of them are dynamic, with computer-generated animated graphics. A few are static - e.g. a room with mirrored walls and enormous faces in each corner. Some of the exhibits are interactive: kiosks with buttons that control sounds and/or images on monitors.

Even the floor has art: areas of glass with mirrors that cause patterns of lights to recede into infinity.

A large central room has curving calls of simulated sandstone, perhaps suggesting a slot canyon. Psychedelic projections on the walls are synched with music; together they build to a climax resembling massive supernovae explosions.

Mixed in with the artwork are objects - machines, signage, consoles - suggesting that we're in the research lab of some kind of evil corporation - perhaps related to the supermarket - whose goal is dehumanization and mind control of consumers. There are suggestions of rancorous corporate politics within this research lab itself, and of mind-control of the researchers themselves. It sounds edgy, but again stops short of making a coherent political statement.

The aesthetic

The exhibits in MW saturate the senses; they dazzle. This is a trend in mass-market culture. For example, Hamilton bashes us over the head with sound and light and simple emotional messages, while My Fair Lady makes you read between the lines.

MS borrows heavily from Burning Man; it gives us a condensed and pre-digested Burning Man experience. For most Americans, MW probably gives a feeling of edginess and risk-taking. It's perhaps intended to create a dystopian and nightmarish impression, or to simulate an acid trip.

It also reminds me faintly of the Exploratorium - a science museum in SF whose exhibits are works of art that - if you stop and read the blurb - illustrate something scientific.

The audience

After I got the gist of MW's exhibits, I focused more on the audience. It was young - almost entirely under 35. Not the older Vegas tourist demographic. Neither dressed up nor hip-looking. Kind of like what you'd find in a shopping mall.

The business model

MW is a tourist attraction. It's not the sort of thing you'd visit repeatedly. Admission is $40, and it doesn't change from one month to the next.

MW hired lots of artists to create the exhibits (about 100 - there's a list of them on the lobby wall). That's good. But I suspect that these artists were paid one-time fees of a few $K, while the corporate entity gets the revenue stream. MW claims to be "thinking about radical ways to subvert current business paradigms", but that sounds like BS to me.

What does it all mean?

I loathe Las Vegas. But it has popularized and monetized some new art forms: the Blue Man Group, Stomp, Cirque du Soleil, and so on. These are gaudy spectacles, but they have some merit: they combine and extend existing music and dance forms, and what they lack in nuance and depth they make up for in explosive creativity. And they've allowed a number of performers to make a living perfoming.

Meow Wolf aspires to do something similar for visual art. Its mission statement is lofty: to "awaken creativity for the masses"; to create a world in which "every square inch is a canvas for creative expression, and the creative class will prosper".