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ON paper it resembles a subplot from David Foster Wallace's deliriously satiric novel ''Infinite Jest'': a billionaire heiress builds a spectacular art museum on family property somewhere in the Deep South and gives it the suspiciously New-Agey name Crystal Bridges. But this is nonfiction. On Nov. 11 Alice Walton, daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, will unveil the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in the small city of Bentonville, Ark. Ms. Walton will always be remembered by New York's cultural custodians for absconding six years ago with Asher B. Durand's ''Kindred Spirits,'' a key piece of Hudson River School painting. (The New York Public Library let it go for about $35 million.) But Ms. Walton, 61, is no harebrained carpetbagger. A serious, lifelong art collector, she intends to make Crystal Bridges a major comprehensive repository of American art from Colonial to contemporary. In 2005 she hired the distinguished art historian and former National Gallery of Art curator John Wilmerding to advise on acquisitions and went on a buying spree that netted a George Washington portrait by Gilbert Stuart; Norman Rockwell's ''Rosie the Riveter'' (1943); Jasper Johns's ''Alphabets'' (1960-62); and a 2009 portrait of Bill Clinton, a friend of Ms. Walton's, by Chuck Close. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]