(2019-05-01) Can An Art Collective Become The Disney Of The Experience Economy

Can an Art Collective Become the Disney of the Experience Economy? Meow Wolf started as a loose group of penniless punks. Now it’s a multimillion-dollar dream factory anchoring an “immersive bazaar” in Las Vegas.

Even though it will most likely feature retail tenants, an ice-cream parlor, a gift shop and a food court, AREA15 is being billed as something fresh and exciting — an “immersive bazaar,” an “experiential retail and entertainment complex,” a place where “artists are front and center.”

even the more traditional retail tenants — a shop selling sneakers, say — will feature some sort of interactive V.R. component. AREA15 will also host events.

The developer Winston Fisher gave me a tour in February... As the third-generation representative of Fisher Brothers, a New York real estate development firm

One long section of the floor plan was blank. It represented the 50,000 square feet of AREA15 that would be given over to the development’s anchor tenant, Meow Wolf. “We’ve blocked this out, because we’re not at liberty to describe what they’re doing yet,” Fisher said coyly.

Six years ago, the group was an anarchic collective of artists who were barely known outside Santa Fe, N.M., their hometown. They numbered a dozen, or a few dozen, depending on how you felt like counting, and were known for prankish installations and raucous warehouse parties.

In the years since, as the group’s playful aesthetic has aligned with the market’s appetites, it has undergone a dizzying transformation. Meow Wolf has broken ground on a $60 million flagship project in Denver that will have more art-exhibit space than the Guggenheim.

Visitors to the Denver-area amusement park Elitch Gardens can strap in for a trip on a Meow Wolf ride

in a few years, you’ll be able to spend the night at the 400-room Meow Wolf hotel in Phoenix

The company produces music videos, runs an annual festival and recently opened a production studio that will churn out television shows and podcasts.

It manufactures and sells the Experience Tube, a five-foot length of stretchy fabric that is supposed to foster human connection — if you stick your head in the tube, you are forced to look at the face of the person at the other end instead of your phone

After Meow Wolf’s most recent fund-raising round concluded earlier this year, what was once a loose confederation of scrappy punks was a corporation with a nine-figure valuation.

“They’re passionate and they’re genuine,” Fisher said. “They didn’t come into this being a corporation. They’re artists who are now growing up. That’s what I think this new economy is going to bring. It’s people like that who are the next titans.”

In Santa Fe, sunsets are psychedelic, income inequality is rampant and basically nothing is open after 8 p.m. All of which made it an odd place to grow up, particularly if you were a rebellious young person with a chip on your shoulder and a suspicion of established authority

The man who is now Meow Wolf’s chief executive, Vince Kadlubek, 37, was so miserable in high school that he petitioned his teachers to let him work on independent projects instead of coming to class

Kadlubek, who is tall and cleft-chinned and intense, wasn’t much of an artist himself, but he liked hanging out with people who were. (hustler?)

Meow Wolf legend begins with him persuading his friends to pool their funds to collectively rent a 900-square-foot former hair salon. With space of their own, “we could do really weird things,” Kadlubek recalls in “Meow Wolf: Origin Story,” a documentary the group commissioned about its early days

The former salon served as both a project space and a place to congregate. (Scene)

Most early Meow Wolf art projects were trash-based.... partly because they couldn’t afford traditional materials. They built entire imaginary realms out of that trash: futuristic cityscapes, tar pits full of glitter, neon forests. Using castoff objects was also an implicit critique of capitalist consumer culture.

Over time, Meow Wolf’s art shows became more elaborate and topographical, full of domes and tunnels and human-size bird nests, a maximalist jumble of a dozen people’s aesthetics all cobbled together. When it didn’t work, it was a mess; when it did work, it was a thrilling mess.

Galleries largely didn’t know what to do with their art: “We work collectively, we make things you can’t buy, that you can’t really document.”

At this point, Meow Wolf wasn’t thinking much about its audience — or maybe it was more that its members’ primary audience was one another

From the earliest days, there was tension between those who wanted to keep things anarchic and open, and a faction, led by Kadlubek and Brinkerhoff, who had bigger ambitions for the group, and who dreamed of building something permanent. When Brinkerhoff brought agendas to a meeting one day, a member of the chaos cohort crumpled one up and tossed it on the floor.

Three years after the collective’s founding, it was invited to create an immersive art installation at Santa Fe’s Center for Contemporary Arts. What they came up with was goofily grandiose in typical Meow fashion: a 73-foot, dimension-hopping, time-transcending galleon christened the Due Return

The $50,000 they raised to build it, partly via Kickstarter, was by far the most they’d ever spent on a project.

none of the 100-plus artists who worked on the project were paid. By the time the ship was dismantled three months later, it had been visited 25,000 times.

This should have been a time of triumph; instead, the collective felt depleted, on the verge of disbanding.

“We’d be taking time off work, paying for things out of our own pockets, just trying to make things work on a shoestring budget — it just wasn’t sustainable.”

Equally frustrated with the gallery model and the nonprofit world, Meow Wolf began considering another path. Visitors to the Due Return had been asked to make a $10 suggested donation. Kadlubek had the proceeds — around $125,000 in cash — stuffed in shoe boxes under his bed.

Di Ianni remembers one day when Kadlubek was fretting, as he often did, about how to take things with Meow Wolf to the next level. But what was the next level? Di Ianni pointed out that they had been working in other institutions’ spaces, relying on other institutions’ funding: “The next level is to support ourselves,” he told his friend. “To become our own institution.”

Maybe what they actually were was a start-up.

In 1998, B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore announced in The Harvard Business Review the advent of what they called the experience economy.

As the authors defined it, “offering” was broad enough to encompass Southwest’s chatty flight announcements and the Apple store’s gleaming rows of open laptops. Consumers (or, as the authors called them, “guests,” following Walt Disney’s lead) increasingly expected an entertaining or interactive context in which to spend their money

Today the experience economy manifests as brand activations, festivals and pop-up shops. It’s there in the shopping complexes opening in major cities in Asia, which claim to make going to the mall feel like a “unique event,”

The world was increasingly hungry for something, and it happened to be very close to what Meow Wolf had already spent years doing.

In 2014, Di Ianni and Kadlubek attended a start-up accelerator in Albuquerque

Kadlubek and Di Ianni won the accelerator’s pitch competition, and Meow Wolf — which would soon reconstitute itself as an L.L.C., with six founding members collectively sharing power and making decisions by consensus — walked away with a $25,000 prize. They spent part of it on a business trip to Disneyland, where Kadlubek, a Disney fanatic, insisted on maximizing every minute in the park... Kadlubek led them on a strategic exploration, focusing less on the rides than the interstitial spaces between them. He called their attention to how the park’s planners subtly shaped crowd movement, and how they provided small moments of surprise and joy that helped distract from the long lines and pricey soft drinks.

The shopping mall of the 1990s is very much Disneyfied.

American culture as a whole has a gloss of Disney to it.” (you say that like it's a good thing)

Kadlubek envisioned Meow Wolf building a new kind of entertainment empire, one that carved out space for weirdness and discomfort. Unlike Disney, Kadlubek told me, “Meow Wolf celebrates the flaw, celebrates the other.”

Meow Wolf was fortunate to get early buy-in from the “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin, a longtime Santa Fe resident who happened to have both deep pockets and an affinity for the fantastical.

Martin eventually agreed to spend $3 million to buy and renovate an abandoned bowling alley in the city, which he would then rent to Meow Wolf.

Contributions from Martin, as well as other New Mexico art patrons, meant that Meow Wolfers could quit their day jobs to work on the House full time. The six founders each had a hand in designing the House, though their roles were increasingly specialized.

Three months before the House was scheduled to open, people were putting in 12-to-14-hour days, six or seven days a week. A hundred thirty-five artists were working full time on the project, and it was still behind schedule and overbudget. The early investors were tapped out, so Kadlubek embarked on an anxious quest for other sources of money

On opening day — March 18, 2016 — there was less than $1,000 in the company checking account

Meow Wolf had planned for 125,000 visitors annually, in a city with a population of just 70,000; they got that many in the first three months. Over that first year, the House of Eternal Return made three times its projected revenue

Soon the House was the most Instagrammed place in the state of New Mexico. In 2018, Time Out placed it fourth on its list of “the best things to do in the world right now.”

Amanda Clay, an escapee from the advertising world, was hired on as the House’s general manager nine months after opening day. At that point there was still no cash-management system.

There was still a pervasive discomfort with hierarchy and authority, which manifested in a resistance to calling people supervisors (management). “They called them time worms,” Clay told me. “I’m like, Oh, my God, you guys.”

The House soon had plenty of immersive, interactive competition. In San Francisco, paying the Museum of Ice Cream’s $38 admission fee gives visitors the chance to cavort in a brightly colored “sprinkle pool”; in New York, the digital media company Refinery29 opened 29Rooms, a pop-up installation designed by brands, artists and celebrities where visitors wandered past walls emblazoned with neon rainbows and posed next to empowering slogans: Live and Let Love, the Future Is Female. Experiential museums and exploration spaces and fun houses cropped up in cities across the country.

These “art experiences” were typically nonideological and nonconfrontational, intended to delight and inspire play; unsurprisingly, they were often friendly with brands, if not conceived by brands in the first place.

Meow Wolf felt confident it was doing something more complex and rich than most of its experience-economy competition, but its members also knew that their out-of-the-way location meant they risked being relegated to roadside-attraction status

In 2017, Meow Wolf dissolved the old consensus-driven egalitarian collective and reformed itself as a B-corporation, answerable to a board, with Kadlubek installed as C.E.O.

Creative but stubborn doesn’t get you very far; creative but recognizing you can put your stuff out there without worrying about selling your soul — that’s something that Meow Wolf gets.”

AREA15 bought a stake in the company, and Fisher took a seat on the board, as did Stewart Alsop, founder of the venture-capital fund Alsop-Louie, an early investor in Twitch and PokémonGo.

one thing its makers have learned a lot about is the sadism of the public. All potential materials are now entered into a spreadsheet where they’re graded on their ability to withstand common abuses: stab, poke, crunch, smash, step, scratch, puncture. When designing its spaces, photographability isn’t Meow Wolf’s main concern. Instead, it aims for a broader, multifarious sense of engagement.

Piecing together the story while navigating the House’s maze of corridors and platforms is something like playing a video game and something like reading a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story, even as it also feels entirely new.

Meow Wolf is banking on the idea that there’s enough intrigue in its stories to compel repeat visits

The installation at AREA15 is even more crucial to Meow Wolf’s future; it will be the proving ground to see whether the company will be able to make something that is at once magical, on budget and replicable without seeming too much like a millennial version of Chuck E. Cheese’s.

While the interactive elements of the House are sensor-based, the new projects will be exponentially more high-tech, and will largely rely on triggers based on computer vision, “a more natural way to interact with technology,” Drew Trujillo, the company’s director of technology, told me.

As the company’s projects have become more expensive and expansive, and as it increasingly operates outside its own local context, it is no longer necessarily regarded as a beloved local underdog. “The problem with Meow Wolf is that it is a supreme act of late-stage capitalism disguised through the collective’s mantra of the underdog as art savior,” the contemporary-art curator Erin Joyce wrote in the online arts magazine Hyperallergic. (2019-03-12) Why Meow Wolf Coming To Phoenix Is Worrisome

Meow Wolf’s artists are also having to familiarize themselves with concepts like value engineering. “Not every object has to be a custom sculpture,” Kadlubek said. “Not every square inch has to be interactive.”

Most of the founders previously worked menial service-industry jobs to keep their time (and minds) free to make weird art. Now that they were newly minted managers and executives of a multimillion-dollar corporation, their days were largely consumed by meetings

In classic start-up fashion, the founders themselves — their wild pasts, their improbable success — had become crucial to the emerging company lore. This was intentional; another one of Kadlubek’s savvy moves was to commission the documentary about the collective’s early days

the rebellious spirit that animated Meow Wolf’s early years coexists somewhat uneasily with an increasingly professionalized atmosphere.

Visitors’ appetite for interactivity extends to the House’s narrative component, which has been much more popular than originally expected. Accordingly, the company is focusing more on what it calls the Meow Wolf story universe, investing in an 11-person narrative team and conceiving of future exhibits as episodes in an overarching meta-epic.

the word “authentic” was used so many times — Meow Wolf is an authentic brand that drives loyalty, and so on — that I started to idly wonder whether I was at the center of an elaborate prank.