Rothko Wilts in Waters's Hand
I love the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. It's been a semi-religious place for me, since my early twenties, when I had a typical young person's crush on the abstract expressionists, and I saw the Walker as the one place in the world that really got me. I'm a little less brooding now, but I still make it to the Walker about once a year, and it's always a highlight for me. I've really enjoyed seeing their collections grow, and seeing them reconfigured, so that familiar works are viewed in a new light. When I was there last week, I saw the current show, “Absentee Landlord,” which was curated by the radical writer and film-maker John Waters . I don’t keep close tabs on Walker acquisitions, but it looked like the show was primarily work from the permanent collection, just re-mixed according to Waters’s sense of what would be cool--like taking all your old songs and making a new mix tape in the hopes that everything will seem new and surprising again, at le