A couple of weeks ago, Dallas' ranking as the 19th "Best Big City for Art" by AmericanStyle Magazine left us slightly underwhelmed. Sure, it didn't suck that Dallas got recognized for something other than being the worst city for hipsters, and sometimes you got to let them haters have it, but nobody's foolin' about the fact that 19 isn't exactly high, particularly when it means coming in behind smaller cities with less Ewing bucks.
So we were more than a bit interested when stumbling across yet another arts-related list upon which a Dallas institution garners a "strong" ranking. Oyster.com -- which exists? -- recently named Hotel ZaZa Dallas No. 3 on an American-heavy list of 10 international "Hotels With Museum Quality Art."
The Stay ZaZa Art House and Social Gallery hosts regular installations in photography, painting, sculpture, mixed-media and fashion runway shows, but did you know that the hotel boasts "concept" rooms called things like "Erotica" and "The Last Czar," which coming in at over 2,125 sq. ft. is a "baroque townhome featur[ing] hand-carved mahogany furnishings, custom brocade fabrics, original artwork and stately paintings of the Russian Royal Family." Which is cool if you can drop about $1,200 per night.
The highly scientific study fails to define what constitutes as "museum quality art," and while there may, in fact, be a case for ZaZa's collection, we're thinking the artistic honor sounds like code for Asian Love Hotel times a heaping helping of ostentation.
