To be honest? I had an interesting experience at t...

To be honest? I had an interesting experience at the Walker. Some things I saw were pretty astonishing. Others were baffling. While some exhibits have vast arrays of visual art (painting, sculpture, modeling, etc.), be prepared for a lot of other mediums that are underrepresented in other artistic forums. A lot of multimedia art, videos, interactive sounds and displays, etc. The building is beautiful, and the facilities are great.

My main digs are:

1. The in-exhibit staff all seem so brooding that they're hard to approach. I'm not joking, and this is the last thing you want in a place that's already attempting to confuse you, because art.

2. The walker has a reputation for being pretentious, and having now been there I don't think that reputation is inaccurate. The gift shop with it's smarmy puzzle-not-puzzles. The gallery of canvases that only had the description of someone else's paintings written on them. A lot of it comes off as a resentment for the audience, and for other forms of art.

3. There's this "Thanks for coming, but you don't understand this." obscurantism that pervades a lot of it. Modern/contemporary art seems like it's attempting to be undefinable, only to find itself perpetually defined only by inscrutability, lest it be held to criticism.

There's this unspoken compulsion when you go to see art to say "all of this matters." But a lot of contemporary art feels very antagonizing because its often intentionally impenetrable. It feels like it's being made specifically for the viewer to question its value, and then resents the viewer for even asking the question.

"Of course it has value, you just don't understand."

It's effectively saying no one but the artist matters. So let's put my name on a toilet, state the art is valuable because it is, and if you question this you're an idiot. And then the self-assured ones become the gatekeepers for an entire generation of art that you're too stupid to understand, and not popularly allowed to question, lest you then be subject to the same criticism modern art is designed to evade.

Some of what I saw? There are some wonderful pieces at the Walker. But there's also a lot of strangeness for the sake of it, which doesn't make anything inherently interesting, impact, meaningful or poignant.

Maybe the point of the art is to force people to write long-winded reviews.