While we're on the subject (I know, you're saying I'm ALWAYS on this subject), here's what the main pond at Crystal Bridges looked like the day after Christmas. Culturgrrl reports that the pond sprang a leak (and on other subjects).

• Are these people trying to get in CBMAA? Ick, say the snobs.

So you’ve got a museum, it’s in Arkansas, it’s got a name that people widely agree sounds like a meth rehab facility and it’s funded with Wal Mart’s filthy lucre. Crystal Bridges, like many of us from The Natural State, has a lot to overcome.

That's part of a funny, but perceptive, piece by Kelly Klaasmeyer, formerly of Conway and now writing for Texas art publication glasstire, on Crystal Bridges Museum. (Thanks to Fayetteville art maven Shannon Dillard Mitchell for pointing this article out!)

The piece is about how others see us and the snobbery that has been transferred to the museum by its connection with Alice Walton's Walmart dollars. Here's one of the greatest observations about the Walmart factor I've read to date:

But I also understand that a portion of the disdain Wal Mart engenders isn’t just because brings in cheap crap from China, it’s because it brings in cheap, TACKY crap from China. Let me offer an anecdotal example. When Target moved into the hipster yuppiedom of the Houston Heights, it was essentially greeted with Cries of Hosanna. When Wal Mart announced its plans to move in as well, you would have thought an open pit nuclear waste dump had been proposed. Target brings in crap from China too, albeit better designed. And Target has had its own controversial practices, although nowhere near the level of the Wal Mart leviathan. But no one can tell me that beneath the outrage, there isn’t some hiss of socioeconomic prejudice: poor people shop at Wal Mart — poor, fat, tacky people (you’ve seen the website, right?). And all that art that Alice Walton was snatching up for her Arkansas museum would be pearls before the Wal Mart shopper swine.

• Crosman

“It has been an honor and privilege to have helped launch what is already among America’s best and most respected museums of American art and getting to know the many wonderful people, most especially the Walton family, who call Arkansas home. I did what I came to do and it is time to return to Maine where our family and deepest roots beckon.”

CBMAA spokesperson Laura Jacobs said that Crosman's last day is the "conclusion of the 5-year assignment to build the inaugural museum collection."

Crosman came to Crystal Bridges from the William A. Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, in 2005, when Princeton art professor and collector John A. Wilmerding was Walton's closest advisor. Once referred to as chief curator, his title shifted to curator of collections when the March hirings of David Houston as director of curatorial and Kevin Murphy as curator of American art were announced. In the book "Celebrating the American Spirit: Masterworks from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art," which went to press some time ago, Crosman was described as "founding curator."

If he returns a call I made to his home in Bella Vista, I'll update this post.

• Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
• "Shimmering": Copley's "Portrait of Mrs. H"

In case you make Eye Candy your first stop on the Arkansas Times home page, note: Max has an item on his Arkansas Blog about the New York Times' rave review of Crystal Bridges, which it describes as a "a big, serious, confident new institution."

The article describes Copley's "Portrait of Mrs. H" as "shimmering," and goes on to single out other important works. The writer, Roberta Smith, says the museum needs to fill a particular hole:

There is one huge blind spot in the collection up to 1900, and it is a very serious one in my book: the almost complete lack of paintings by largely self-taught or folk artists. This country’s folk art is as great and as original as any other art it has produced; its uncanny fusion of abstraction and representation, and of primitive and modern makes it the American equivalent of Sienese painting in the early Italian Renaissance. Leaving it out is like looking at the story of American art with only one eye.

In one of Eye Candy's many helpful posts for Crystal Bridges, I wrote about Sotheby's "American Paintings, Silver, Folk Art and Sculpture" auction in September, and there suggested she might want to pick up William Edmondson's "Angel with Cape Surround" in case she needed Eye Candy's assistance in collecting outsider art. Someone bought it, for $98,000; perhaps AW has it stashed somewhere for future exhibition. Alas, the whirligig I also suggested did not sell at all.

• William Edmondson's "Angel with Cape Surround"

• Gari Melcher's "Portrait of Mrs. H"

What's up at CBMAA in January:

Starting Jan. 4, visitors to Crystal Bridges won't need to reserve a time to visit the Bentonville museum. Also that day, a free, hour-long guided tour, "Strong Women," starts at 2:30 p.m.; meet in the main lobby about 15 minutes before tour time. The tour will focus on women as artists and subjects.

The museum will offer guided tours at 2:30 p.m. every Monday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. On Jan. 5, the tour will focus on the permanent collection; the Jan. 7 tour will focus on the themes of the work in the "Wonder World" contemporary exhibit (meet in south lobby).

"Skyspace Discussions" at the James Turrell sculpture "The Way of Color" on the grounds continue Jan. 4, 6, 11, 13, 18 and 20 just before sunset. Discussions last about 40 minutes. The seats inside the sculpture are heated.

And at 11:30 a.m. Jan. 9, horticulturist Cody George and education director Niki Stewart will give a talk, "Shifting Perspectives With Nature," in front of Asher Durand's "Kindred Spirits" in the colonial gallery.

Read more about the museum in Arkansas Business' "Top 10 Business Stories for 2011."

• Lee Rosenbaum
• A replica of Sam Walton's truck, at Crystal Bridges

Jeff Goldberg's attack last week in Bloomberg Views on Alice Walton for building Crystal Bridges, which he calls a "moral tragedy," has gotten blowback from the futureofcapitalism.com ("Remind me if I ever get rich not to start an art museum. It seems to be just an invitation for attacks from the press," writes editor Ira Stoll, earning a "bravo" from freelance journalist Judith Dobryznski) and Lee Rosenbaum (culturgrrl) ("Jeffrey Goldberg has gone off the deep end.")

Like culturgrrl, I don't think Walmart's treatment of its employees (which Ira Stoll defends) is something the family can be particularly proud of, as lawsuits over gender discrimination and other issues attest. And the philanthropy of the Walton Foundation includes dollars to class-dividing charter schools, whose uneven education and promotion of segregation supporters turn a blind eye to.

You can't blame Goldberg for pointing out the obscenity in the Walton wealth and desire that Walmart would pay its employees enough that they didn't have to be on the public dole to make ends meet. But hey, those of us who love the museum are conflicted enough, already!

Here's the deal: This "moral tragedy" has brought a lot of joy to the people of Bentonville and Arkansas. It will bring more, as Pat and Willard Walker largesse brings in the kiddos to see Thomas Eakins, Alexander Calder and Dan Flavin. It was even the attitude of two women I spoke to at the opening that the Crystal Bridges is their museum, because they shop at Walmart. "We built it," they told me, without a trace of resentment. Are they slaves talking about the pyramids? If the slaves were proud of their handiwork and brought their kids to see it, maybe so. But should you shake a finger at them and tell them to they ought to know better than enjoy a museum built by ubercapitalists?

Rosenbaum writes,

Goldberg blasts Crystal Bridges as "a compelling symbol of the chasm between the richest Americans and everyone else." I see it, instead, as "a compelling symbol" of the benefits of making our nation's cultural riches available to all...including Wal-Mart's workers, should they ever choose to make a visit.

So weigh in here, Candy fans.