0.19 Sodom and tomorrow  (Page 5/17)

After those prodigious feats, Chihuly talked his way into the old Walled City of Jerusalem, where he installed towers (including one standing 32 feet and weighing in at 25 tons), chandeliers and various other glass pieces in one of art history’s grander gestures: Jerusalem 2000 . Who but Chihuly, I wondered, would have the nerve to try putting his mark on the Millennium by improving the look and feel of the cradle of Judeo-Christianity with his own artwork?

I met with him in his celebrated Boathouse, on the north shore of Lake Union, next to Ivar’s Salmon House. He took me up to his apartment there, at the top of a twisted flight of stairs above the offices and display rooms at water level. I reminded him that I spent a few days with him in 1982, and his face registered shock. “A lot has happened since you saw me last,” he said after we shook hands. “Now I’m a CEO, I guess.” He sounded utterly exhausted, as if the prodigious efforts exerted over those 19 years had finally caught up with him this very morning.

It is undeniably true that the small studio operation I saw when I first met him had become a corporation-scale enterprise. Chihuly now employed 120 people working in three different facilities: the Boathouse; a group of warehouses in Ballard where his huge pieces were assembled for approval by clients, then dismantled and packed for shipping; and a 75,000-square-foot warehouse on the Tacoma waterfront, from where his work was shipped out in containers to museums, galleries, and private collectors around the world. At any given time now, between ten and 20 Chihuly installations were under construction somewhere in the world, and he had, on average, two museum openings a month. It was reliably estimated that his enterprise brought in $1.5 million per month.

It was not surprising then that he had lost touch with most of the colleagues from his salad days. Chihuly the celebrity was viewed with disdain (or, said his friends, jealousy) by many local artists, and even those who praised his genius decried his estrangement from the “real” arts world. It was widely assumed in Seattle that he had earned his fame and financial success at the expense of his integrity, and that his art now was more eye candy than food for the soul.

Sitting that day with him in his apartment looking out over Lake Union, I felt a palpable sense of isolation. I had had to set up this appointment weeks in advance, and was ushered in to Chihuly, as if to the Master, by a businesslike young woman who met me in an office downstairs. And the Chihuly I encountered had changed in disquieting ways from the iconoclastic Barnum I remembered. His voice was much softer, his speech more halting; he ingested a prodigious array of vitamins and assorted other pills every morning; he moved slowly and awkwardly, as if coping with the aches and pains of old age; his hair, still artfully disarranged and tangled in that famous Chihuly ‘do, was much thinner, and inexpertly dyed black, lending him something of the air of Gustave Aschenbach near the end of Death in Venice . He seemed markedly doleful and talked almost exclusively of business rather than art, his discourses on his work limited largely to comments about the outsized scale of his installations.