“That future has a name, and it is an unlikely one: Meow Wolf.”īut first, Meow Wolf is stretching its tentacles into your living room. “I have seen the future of art,” Davis wrote. But the need for shorthand says more than the name itself. Coming from a critic, that doubles as a back-handed compliment. Even as he bemoaned the consequences of its “admissions-based model,” critic Ben Davis coined a genre for the movement: Big Fun Art. Though some more-traditional gatekeepers might fear it, Meow Wolf’s ascendance is hard to deny. Then it’s on to Denver, where it’ll hatch a $60 million, 90,000-square-foot immersive art park in 2020 followed by a permanent exhibit in Washington, D.C. That starts in the coming months, as Meow Wolf readies its first expansion: an “experience shopping mall” set in a trippy art bazaar in Las Vegas called Area 15, poised to open next year. In two years, the House has transformed Meow Wolf from a cadre of broke creatives into a 400-employee-strong organization with a fundraising clip on par with tech startups - and a shot at upending the art and entertainment industries as we know them. Telaportative fridges, a Flintstones-style mastodon skeleton marimba, impromptu trapeze shows - it’s all commonplace in the House of Eternal Return, a 20,000-square-foot, wormhole-riddled art playhouse from Meow Wolf, the scrappy Santa Fe, New Mexico, art-collective-turned-conglomerate that’s poised to plunge the country into the multiverse, one WTF moment at a time. “Are you coming to The Gathering?” she smiles. As the door begins to creak shut, a young woman in a polka-dot skirt skips up to catch it. A family walks up to it and is swallowed whole by its comforting glow. More people are doing it – that’s all to the good.A roomful of strangers are milling around the kitchen of an austere Victorian home when the first portal opens. Lots of folks interested in doing what we’re doing. That’s what appeals to people who come to our exhibitions. “Any opportunity for people to come together, to explore imaginative approaches, immersive experiences, storytelling, choose-your own adventure… that’s all nurturing and healing and inspiring. “After a year spent stuck in our houses, there’s nothing like experiencing art to heal the soul,” said Rubinstein. When Meow Wolf or a similar experience opens a location in cities like Denver, Las Vegas (site of Meow Wolf’s second permanent installation, opened February 18, 2021), it not only contributes something new and interesting to the community’s art scene and provides a platform for local artists, it also brings in money for surrounding businesses. But in a broader sense, this kind of data helps make the case for the enduring and sustainable economic value of the arts – a case that the industry itself does not always do a good job making for itself in quantitative terms. As a social impact organization, Meow Wolf sees this kind of “rising tide” effect as central to its own business goals. That’s for one company, in one location, in one state. These revised estimates add $1-1.5B to the company’s expected economic impact over 10 years for a total of $2.5B to $2.9B.The main contributor to that change is a more than 3x increase in out of state visitors to the Santa Fe location. The company is also projecting roughly a 100% increase in NM revenue over the same period driven by both an increase in volume of visitors and an increase in visitor spend.Since this report came out, Meow Wolf is projecting 50% more hires in New Mexico over the 10 year period.The State of New Mexico, in an Economic Development Report completed in 2017, expected Meow Wolf to contribute $1.5B in taxable sales over 10 years.Meow Wolf has done economic impact studies on its work and is releasing some of those results exclusively for the first time. If those trends hold, it will not only be great news for the fans who enjoy fun and innovative ways to enjoy art and storytelling, but also for the artists and communities who participate in the upsurge in interest.
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