![]() ![]() ![]() “We were putting art into a context it had never been put into before. “We knew this was going to go viral,” Kadlubek told me. The only people not blindsided by the House’s success, it seems, are the Meow Wolfers themselves, led by their combatively self-assured CEO, Vince Kadlubek. And every week, the line outside stretches farther and farther toward the sunbaked, 30-foot-tall robot at the opposite end of the parking lot. Its gross revenue of $9 million could’ve recouped the exhibit’s construction cost nearly four times over. Last year, Meow Wolf drew 500,000 people. When Meow Wolf first set out to turn an abandoned Santa Fe bowling alley into the House, in 2015, it told investors it would need 100,000 visitors per year to break even, a far-fetched goal for a ragtag band of dumpster-foraging artists. The ticket-buying public, it’s fair to say, has responded with similar enthusiasm to the collective’s experiment in family-friendly psychedelia. “The first time I walked through, I thought, My god, this is what it looks like when you dream - come to life! ” said Winston Fisher, a Meow Wolf investor who now sits on the company’s board of directors. ![]() Next door to the interdimensional travel agency, on the way to the mastodon cavern, a long, tubular owl slowly blinks down at passers-by from its glacier-blue roost. Inside House of Eternal Return, hidden bookcase doors lead to rainbow-lit simulations of non-Euclidean space-time. As Emily Montoya, one of the collective’s co-founders, told me, “We bring out the adult in the child and the child in the adult.” The aim, in other words, is to make even a grandmother want to bowl through you to gaze in stupefaction at a fridge. What Meow Wolf sells isn’t just art but awe, hypershareable and appropriate for all ages - less MoMA, more Magic Mushroom Kingdom. Equal parts art pageant, labyrinth of curiosities, and interactive storytelling experience, the House is best understood as a wonderland of creative consciousness expansion. Somewhat by design, it’s difficult to explain exactly what House of Eternal Return is, because words like “museum” and “gallery” certainly don’t cover it. Behind them, down the refrigerated rabbit hole, a glowing white corridor plunged into the unknown. From where one expected to see racks and crispers, two wide-eyed teenagers emerged. On cue, the fridge’s door slowly swung open, spreading a fan of milky light across the linoleum floor. “Look! Look!” she called back to her family, pointing insistently. Instead, my assailant was a grandmotherly woman in a teal blouse, who now stared raptly at the refrigerator. I wheeled around, expecting to find, say, a vacationing linebacker. One afternoon this spring, I was exploring the dim, salmon-pink kitchen inside the Meow Wolf collective’s first permanent exhibit, House of Eternal Return - a sprawling, fever-dream portrayal of a family home that had a nasty brush with the multiverse - when someone bulldozed me aside from behind. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |