The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which opened last month in this small town in northwest Arkansas, is off to a running start. Crystal Bridges is poised to make a genuine cultural contribution, and possibly to become a place of pilgrimage for art lovers from around the world.
Crystal Bridges is user friendly in ways big and small. Admission is free, and it has an ambitious education program that will, among other things, reach out to more than 80,000 elementary school students in the area. And in some of the interstices between its pavilions — where one might have been grimly prepared to see museum gift shops — it has areas outfitted with comfortable chairs and couches and stocked with stacks of art books for browsing.
These elements, like the museum they are part of, convey the belief that art, like music and literature, is not a recreational luxury or the purview of the rich. Rather, it is an essential tool for living to which everyone must have access, because it helps awaken and direct the individual talent whose development is essential to society, especially a democratic one. Art, after all, is one of the places where the pursuit of happiness gains focus and purpose and starts expanding outward, to aid and abet that thing called the greater good.
Crystal Bridges, the Art Museum Walmart Money Built — Review – NYTimes.com.