[Illustration by Richard Belotte]

Oct. 28, 2001

A Chihuly "seaform"

Chihuly's work is marked by shameless opulence and excess. Rather than focus on the exquisite craftsmanship of single pieces of glass, he would rather make hundreds of pieces, and suspend them from the ceiling or float them down the canals of Venice with a film crew in tow. He works in rich, bright colors, and wild swirling patterns. Seattle artist Charles Krafft calls Chihuly "the Liberace of the art world," and his work does indeed look right at home in Las Vegas.

His penchant for flamboyance and spectacle may not have gained him many fans in the local independent art scene, but those same qualities have made him a millionaire many times over. Chihuly's extravagance and supersized ego clearly strike a chord with the rich and powerful, especially in Hollywood, where he is collected avidly.

Chihuly chandelier

While some of Chihuly's work is undeniably gorgeous (especially when presented in expertly lit photographs), his detractors call it mere decoration that attracts the eyes without engaging the mind. Chihuly's work is as vacuous as it is popular, they say, comparable to the work of another successful Seattleite, Kenny G. "It's craft, not art," is a common refrain.

"It's bullshit art," says Art Garcia, a Seattle painter. "If you've seen one you've seen 'em all."

The ire the art draws is compounded by the personality of the artist. Dale Chihuly is by some accounts an unpleasant person to deal with.

Former Chihuly employee Jim Hearsey describes him as an irrational tyrant surrounded by an army of trembling sycophants. "When rich people visited, Dale would be super charming, but then he'd come into the kitchen screaming, 'Goddamnit! Where's the wine and cheese?' He would just totally freak out before we even knew what he was talking about."

According to Hearsey, Chihuly's abuse of his employees went beyond momentary temper tantrums. "I've seen him reduce secretaries to tears by screaming at them, insulting their families and upbringing," says Hearsey.

Hearsey describes a man who has for so long been surrounded by people ready to fulfill his every whim that his sense of normal social behavior has become warped. "He'll walk into a bookstore," says Hearsey, "and gesture at a whole shelf of books and say, 'I'll take all those,' then walk out. The bookstore staff are supposed to figure out how to send it to him. The amazing thing is he actually gets away with it." Hearsey lists other instances of awed locals granting Chihuly special treatment, including exemption from having his driver's license photo taken (so he wouldn't have to stand in line with the masses), and having a British Airways flight delayed because he was running late.

Because of a 1976 car accident that left him without sight in his left eye, Chihuly for the most part does not blow glass himself, doing drawings of glass designs instead, and directing other glassblowers as they carry them out. But Hearsey claims that that Chihuly's oversight of his workshop is cursory at best.

"He makes a big show of ordering people around when there's a visitor or film crew around, yelling at the glassblowers to do do this, don't do that. The glassblowers go along with whatever he's saying, and then when he leaves everything goes back to normal."

As for Chihuly's paintings, those energetically applied swirls of acrylic colors, Hearsey says they are churned out in mass quantities whenever "inspiration" strikes.

"He would suddenly decide he wanted to paint and we would tack up small pieces of paper on the porch. He would spray them with paint-filled squirt bottles, screaming at us the whole time, 'the green the green the green! No, not that green, goddamnit! The other green.' He can do 15 paintings in ten minutes like that. They go for a thousand dollars each."

Painting is a sideline, however. It is of course glass that has made Chihuly his millions. His shop sometimes churns out 200 to 300 pieces a day, says Hearsey, pieces that sell for $1,000 each. But most of the glassblowers whose hands actually produce the work toil for about $100 a day plus free lunch (display handlers, quality control, and other skilled staff reportedly make far less), and receive no benefits, according to Hearsey.

Hearsey says that in his own case, "I worked there for over a year, making, handling, and finishing the pieces, and I never made more than $10 an hour."

Nickalene Johnson, an HR representative for Chihuly, Inc., denies that any unfair labor practices take place in the studio.

"[Hearsey's] allegations that the glassblowers who work for the studio are paid a low hourly wage and receive no benefits are inaccurate," she writes in response to an email query. "Contrary to what you have been told, glassblowers at Chihuly, Inc. are not paid a low hourly wage and those who are eligible, do receive benefits."

Johnson declines to provide details: "I appreciate your interest in gathering more specific information regarding Chihuly Inc.'s compensation practices. However, I must inform you that this is considered confidential information, which I am not at liberty to divulge."

At any rate, we do know that Chihuly makes a bunch of money, that he may be a bit of an ass, and his art is not exactly cutting edge. For the sake of argument, let us further suppose that he does treat his workers like shit and that he has become removed from the nuts and bolts of glassblowing. Are those good reasons for other Seattle artists to despise him?

We put the question to Charles Krafft, an artist who has lived and worked in the Northwest for the better part of three decades.

If the Seattle art world's animus toward Chihuly has a representative, it is Krafft, if only by virtue of the "Smash a Chihuly" event he organized in 1997, along with his cohorts in the Mystic Sons of Morris Graves (a semi-secretive "fraternal brotherhood with an elusive aesthetic"). The Mystic Sons raffled off an opportunity to break a small but valuable Chihuly bowl, an event that was both a conceptual art piece and an unusually direct form of criticism.

Krafft's Porcelain Grenades

Krafft has more recently gained an international reputation on the strength of his series of porcelain weapons. The weapons are meticulously cast in clay and painted in the ornamental patterns of traditional china. Krafft also makes human bone china which he calls Spone® Funerary Ware. Cremated remains are used to prepare a piece of Spone®, on which Krafft then paints a portrait of the deceased. Krafft's Web site encourages potential customers to consider how "becoming a Spone® vase or commemorative plate beats moldering unattended in a family burial plot."

Spone® portrait plate

Krafft's art has the edginess and conceptual originality that Chihuly is criticized for lacking. While Chihuly's art makes few demands on the viewer beyond attention and admiration, much of Krafft's work is overtly confrontational. While not sensationally offensive in the manner of, say, a shit-smeared Virgin Mary, it requires evaluation and response (is human bone china a sick joke, or is it a serious form of commemoration?) and challenges assumptions about what art is.

Krafft's art has failed to make him as rich as Chihuly, or even to support him beyond what he calls "refugee conditions," despite critical acclaim. "You can't eat reviews," he says. But though he sees Chihuly as a self-promoting charlatan, Krafft "doesn't begrudge him his success."

The real problem with the Chihuly phenomenon, says Krafft, "is is that he's so overblown and it's the only thing that defines this region in a lot of people's minds." Krafft complains that coverage of the arts in Seattle's mainstream press is virtually nonexistent, and that the scanty amount of coverage that is done focuses on a few big names, Chihuly foremost among them.

"We don't have a very good critical base. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer art critic] Regina Hackett is obviously tired of her job. Critics are bought for their ability to do show catalogs. We are missing the lively critical feedback that characterizes thriving art scenes in other cities." Krafft also singles out for censure the film maker Gary Gibson, who has made a series of fawning documentaries about Chihuly for the local PBS affiliate, KCTS.

In Krafft's view, the closed-minded, brown-nosing local media aid and abet Chihuly as he makes off with the lion's share of the limited money and exposure available to artists; Chihuy makes brightly colored trinkets that are spoon-fed to the public by a media too lazy to seek out more challenging art.

But is it possible to draw a clear line between fine art and art that is crassly commercial? It's not a distinction that worries Larry Stauffer, another Seattle artist. Stauffer sees it as each artist's duty to aggressively seek material success, and is proud of the escalating prices his own work fetches. He considers the difference between art and craft to be "about 15 or 20 thousand dollars."

Stauffer's Obelisk

Stauffer has met with success creating neon-illuminated glass shards contained in sturdy metal and plate glass housing. He started out as a porcelain artist, but was forced to change mediums after surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome. Rebuilding his career gave him a respect for the kind of focused effort it takes to attain the level Chihuly has reached, regardless of the man's personal qualities.

"I think he's a piece of shit, frankly," he says of Chihuly. "He's a drunk, he's whacked. Everybody I know who has interacted with him has nothing but bad things to say. But I don't care! He made 23 million dollars last year! The more successful I am, the more I understand what it takes to get there, and I appreciate that."

Stauffer thinks the charge that Chihuly is less of an artist because he doesn't blow his own glass is beside the point.

"It's not that he's particularly gifted, because I don't think he is. But he's got the stuff to pull it all together. He's a production artist and I admire that a great deal." He compares Chihuly to a movie director, someone at the center of a large-scale, collaborative process.

Stauffer harbors a populist disdain for the conception of the artist as alienated provocateur.

"I'm just as much a showman and a fraud as Chihuly is," he happily confesses. "I'm just making stuff that's dramatic. I grew up reading comic books and I'm still influenced by showy things. I'm just as responsive to a carnival barker as the next common person." A direct appeal to the senses, then, is something for which Chihuly is to be admired,
not despised.

But does the bright spotlight on Chihuly leave the work of more challenging artists in the dark? Stauffer is unsympathetic.

"The people who are jealous and bitchy either don't have enough talent or ambition." Artists would do better, he says, to emulate Chihuly's self-promotional drive and appeal to the "upper echelon people" with the money to patronize art. In his view the problem of unjust distribution of artistic recognition is a non-issue; those who are industrious and imaginative naturally flourish. His advice to struggling artists is "you've got to take care of your own shit."

Richard Painter, the proprietor of Red & Gold Gallery in Seattle's Pioneer Square, isn't crazy about the subject of Dale Chihuly:

"It seems like everyone who comes in here wants to talk about Chihuly. I feel like I'm being guided by people who want to vent and I don't necessarily want to go there. I don't like knocking any artist. I think it's bad form." As to why Chihuly-haters get on his nerves, Painter says it's because Chihuly makes too easy a target. "I guess people think they're having an original thought."

Still, with only a little prompting, he expresses disbelief at the prices Chihuly commands, and exasperation with wealthy art collectors who have no interest in undiscovered talent. "I guess people look at art as an investment, and they want to have the same thing so-and-so has. But I thought the idea of being a collector was you're supporting some unheard of artist who needs support."

Painter shakes his head at the the prospect of the Chihuly, Inc. machine gobbling up yet another million-dollar commission.

"There are plenty of people who need support. Just a small fraction of the cost of a Chihuly would make a huge difference to someone like Ray Wirtz." Painter's gallery recently hosted a show of Wirtz's work, a series of self-portraits consisting of photocopies painted over with acrylic and pastel.

Though Painter's gallery is struggling, he doesn't succumb to bitterness, or blame Chihuly. "There's a Chinese proverb," he says, " 'you never get rich counting your neighbor's money.' "

(Note: the Red & Gold Gallery is available for sublease. Please email Richard Painter or call (206) 213-0470.)

Related sites:

• The official Web site of Dale Chihuly
• Villa Delirium Delft Works, Charles Krafft's site
• Some info on Art Garcia from the Web site of the Roq la Rue Gallery
• An anti-Chihuly rant on Puppet's Lounge, an arts Web site