I thought I just really hated art. Or the art world. Like Dave Hickey does. Maybe I do. Maybe not. Let’s find out together. One month ago, I was officially diagnosed with bipolar disorder not otherwise specified (BD-NOS), or, in less official parlance, bipolar 3. My new psychiatrist describes bipolar 3 as a mixed-mood disorder [...]
The new normal should be anything but. Time to fuck shit up. Dear Young DFW Whippersnapper Artists, Whatever the last “up” economy may have taught you, in your teen years, about what art is, how it should look in an art fair booth or ad in Artforum, how it’s valued, how famous you can [...]
I really don’t understand the brouhaha over this Museum Tower thing. All I see are opportunities. Perhaps the lawyers on both sides lack vision. Lawyers, arbitrators, city council members. Not Jeremy Strick, or the press, of course. Clearly, the Tower and its creators are at fault. That’s well established. But Nasher’s hands are tied, and [...]
You must have noticed, if you live in DFW, that there’s some pretty exciting artwork bobbing all over its various surfaces. Local artists are getting busy, many on their own terms or under new conditions forced by a stagnant economy. This has me jonesing; I want and I want. I have the eye for collecting, [...]
This last April I attended a curators’ symposium in Austin during the Texas Biennial. It was a day-long series of panel discussions and presentations hosted by Arthouse, right around the time Arthouse was enduring some serious criticism over its censorious and/or irresponsible treatment of two prime exhibitions and of its own confused and confusing treatment [...]
Look. We have a problem here that creative people are learning to circumvent. The economy is awful, and while auction-house prices are staying weirdly 1%-er high, the rest of the art world—discrete art scenes, city by city—are still experiencing a hell of a financial sinkhole. This is when artists do what Tina Fey writes about [...]
This wasn’t meant to be a column about art fairs—it was meant to be about wealth and conservatism—but art fairs are something I know and wealth and conservatism are major players at fairs. I can’t find the exact quote I’ve been searching for so here’s my wonky memory at work: In either late 2008 or [...]
So you wanna be an artist. A successful artist. Then these are some rules to live by. Granted, artists are good at breaking rules (and should), and you can take or leave what you like here. But as far as I can tell, the successful artists I know have internalized this stuff. About you: Admit [...]
Philip Haas, an American filmmaker best known for his feature Angels and Insects, was commissioned by the Kimbell Art Museum to create something novel: five film installations for the museum “inspired by works in the collection”. Titled Butchers, Dragons, Gods & Skeletons, it was introduced as a summer show—a good time for a museum to [...]
Dallas is on the cusp of something. Will it seize the moment? The new Arts District is emerging and Dallas is experiencing an influx of arts faculty and institutional curators and directors. Galleries are closing and there’s tense discussion over the future of the Dallas Contemporary. Recessionary psychology has engendered the first (in my experience), [...]
Recently, a young Dallas reporter was interviewing me in my gallery and asked, “Is there anything you’d like to say to the collectors in the face of this recession?” At that moment I sat back with no comment, feeling sorry for myself and the collectors, but as you may have guessed if you read the [...]
A few days ago, an acquaintance walked up to me at an art event and asked, “Are you enjoying all your new leisure time?” I blinked, took a deep breath and finally managed to cough out something about doing some writing. I felt like he had slapped me hard. He couldn’t have known that I [...]
He loves me, he loves me not… When does a work of art slide out of the defining, albeit hazy boundaries of artwork and into something else entirely: sociology, anthropology, geo-political criticism? Even post-Duchamp and Magritte, we still have to sometimes ask: How much transformation from an originating source is required before transcendence, a.k.a. “art,” [...]
