Static ViewModels sounds like an awful idea (I consider static evil as a general principle). This would mean that you can't have more than one instance of a ViewModel. I can think of many examples of UI where there are several instances of the same View type, but that wouldn't be possible with static ViewModels.
If you want to enable communication across Views, Publish/Subscribe (events) are a much better option.
Remember that when we talk about ViewModels/Presentaion Models they usually expose underlying Domain Objects. If you have sevaral Views that display parts of the same Domain Object, you can have the Domain Object raise events when it changes state, and any ViewModel that display data from that Domain Object can subscribe to those events and update their controls accordingly.