0.19 Sodom and tomorrow  (Page 6/17)

As we talked, he mentioned, along with the scale of the Bellagio project and the number of people and amount of heavy equipment he employed for Jerusalem 2000 , the laboratory he is operating in Ballard, where he is experimenting with ways to make plastic look like glass—an initiative, should it succeed, that would allow him to construct works of even more staggering size. It grew increasingly clear that size mattered a great deal to Chihuly—he came back to the topic again and again. “Blue Feather Tower,” he said at one point, returning to discussion of Jerusalem 2000 , “was 60 feet high and had more than 3,000 parts…. We used a 200-foot crane to bring things into the castle, we had eleven 40-foot containers of glass, 4,000 pieces, and I took about 30 people….”

Gone were the enthusiastic and energetic paeans to glass as an artistic medium, to the mission of the glass artist, to the magical properties of glass in its delivery of color and light. I felt almost as if I were talking to an animatronic version of the younger, charismatic Chihuly—a figure who now was soullessly going through the motions of being an artist—particularly when he talked, as he did at great length, oblivious or indifferent to the symbolic implications, of his dream of moving from glass to plastic.

Chihuly interrupted my line of questions at one point to ask me how I felt about present-day Seattle. I commenced a long speech about how diminished I thought it was, how money and the quest for glory and celebrity had corrupted it, then stopped in mid-pronouncement when I noticed that Chihuly was staring at me as if he thought I was completely insane.

As our conversation neared its end, I felt myself falling prey to an overwhelming sense of gloom. I could not bring myself to admire the successful Chihuly anywhere near as much as I had admired—liked, really—the striving younger Chihuly. It made me wonder whether material success seen through eyes like mine—the eyes of an unregenerate Seattleite—could ever appear as anything other than a passage from dreamy, glamorous idealism to seamy cynicism. Sitting there, listening to Chihuly talk about the size of this exhibition and the size of that piece, about business and money and grandeur and Vegas and celebrity and attention and nearly everything but art, all I could think about was his passage from charismatic artist/visionary to chagrined old king in his tower, counting his money and boasting zestlessly about the size of his kingdom.

Finished now, we stood, walked down a flight of stairs, and made our way to a long room looking out over Lake Union. The room was a good 100 feet long, and scarcely wider than an amazing table, made from an old-growth tree cut lengthwise, that ran nearly its full length. I stood at one end and looked in some wonder at two 100-foot rows of little Chihuly glass sculptures arranged on the table. They had been produced by the crews working all day long, day after day, in the huge studio behind the Boathouse. “I have to look these over,” he said as he turned away from me, “to decide which ones are good enough to sign.”