Last week, the security cameras at the Meadows Museum caught Edmund P. Pillsbury (Ted to his friends and sycophants) red-handed. Actually, surveillance video revealed white-gloved hands carefully tracing the gentle curve of a nude woman’s buttocks. He was seen stroking the arch of another’s back, caressing the contours of her…

On any given day in Dallas, you can saunter in to Gerald Peters Gallery on Fairmount Street and buy a small Picasso painting for $1.25 million, or pick up a sofa-sized David Bates at Dunn and Brown Contemporary for around $80,000. At the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art, you can…

Outside looking in: Dallas and Houston are more alike than they are different. Texas’ two largest cities are sprawling, urbane population centers with mostly robust economies, decent tourism and as much culture as the howdy-do’s can muster. Differences seem insignificant: Houston’s a port, while Dallas is landlocked. Houston has higher…

4/3 We tried to read Great Expectations twice before giving up and buying the Cliffs Notes. Charles Dickens just never really appealed to us. If you’re of the same bent, or even if you like Dickens, you’re bound to enjoy The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a “music whodunit” based on…

4/5 Heads up! You’re smack-dab in the middle of our brief, semiannual window of opportunity for all things al fresco. You know, right now and for about 72 measly more hours, the days are warm, not sweltering; the nights are cool, not cold; and the West-Nile-virulent skeeters are just beginning…

Perhaps the erudite among you don’t live paycheck-to-paycheck, even in this economy, but we do. Our December paydays aren’t cooperating with Christmas shopping this year, either. We get paid on December 12 and December 26, and even if the accounting grinches turn loose of our petty cash a couple of…

One day you’ll just have to have your own parade, you white-bread, plain ole “Amuricans” of multi-British Isles and possibly Dutch ancestry. Seriously. Those of you with limited and/or ill-defined ethnic heritage (and nothing to prove) will simply get all dressed up one day and march your lily-pale, boring asses…

There’s an angry little hornet’s nest of women in Dallas who have clung together and stung together for 20 years. At this point in their life cycles, the frenzy is about to peak, and no amount of swatting or spraying can get rid of them. Like their counterparts in the…

Don’t come whining to us if you wet your pants in the middle of the Arlington Museum of Art this week. You’ll get no sympathy here. We did it once, although sadly it had nothing to do with being scared silly during the museum’s annual October fright-fest, Dungeon of Doom…

It’s never my actual house, or any house I’ve lived in, but I clearly feel it is my home. I’m inside, walking through, a silent observer at first. The house is crowded with people, shoulder to shoulder; they laugh, dance, drink. I wander through them, not recognizing anyone. I say,…

There’s a reason we humans have pharynxes, larynxes and great, flopping, flexible, thrusting tongues. We speak. Ditto for our amazing opposable thumbs that fly furiously over a keyboard or grip a pencil with the greatest of ease. We write. With due deference to body language, we’ve evolved into word-dependent communicators,…

The lyin’, cheatin’, rat-bastard financial wizards of Wall Street might not think much of our latest investment theory. But, hey, what have they done for you lately? Here it is; short, simple, free-for-nothing, without the slightest hope of a commission: Buy art. Buy original. Buy local. During the next two…

More than the bunions, calf muscles and hip joints of Dallas dancers are hurting this year. The tough economy is particularly rough on “the arts,” which are increasingly dependent on corporate sponsors when individual supporters get a look at what happened last quarter to their 401(k)s. We almost lost the…

Admit it. You’ve done it, and your silence is part of your shame. Statistics say you’re still doing it, perhaps more than the once-a-week average; and statistics don’t lie. We imagine you think you’re doing it when no one is around, where no one will see you or catch you…

The last time the McKinney Avenue Contemporary invited an artist to slap black paper cut-outs on its white-walled gallery, controversy ensued. Back in January 1999, Kara Walker waxed the MAC’s walls and posted black-paper silhouettes depicting sexual atrocities and violence which were as dark as her intended commentary on America’s…

You could argue that during most of these long, hot summer baseball seasons, the Texas Rangers play like stiff-legged, bandaged-head-to-toe, eyeless, earless mummies. You know, with knees and elbows that hardly bend, growling and groaning on the way to first base, trailing muslin streamers and looking for all the world…

Binge-drinking isn’t even remotely compatible with parenthood, so Sunday mornings find my husband and me clear-headed, albeit bleary-eyed-tired from a long week of toddler-chasing. We cling to two other vices when the baby’s asleep–chain-smoking and coffee-chugging–out on the porch. I’ll usually start the conversation with a button-pushing rant for my…

Twyla Tharp is neither excited nor exhausted, she says, as she prepares to bring her rebirthed Twyla Tharp Dance to dance-legend-starved Dallas in the middle of a 25-city international tour. “I’m pleased with the dancers and pleased that audiences are responding,” Tharp says without much enthusiasm, calling to mind her…

What is it about The Wizard of Oz that drives so many creative types to reinterpret L. Frank Baum’s classic fable into something “fresh” and “new”? First, it was Judy Garland’s star vehicle on film; then, Broadway’s innovative The Wiz, followed by a lame film version of the stage show;…

Lately, it’s been hard to throw a rock through a plate-glass gallery window or museum front door without having it bounce off the canvas of some stellar example of a painting by a native Mexican artist. Noted Latino art has seeped into the Dallas Museum of Art and Adani Gallery,…

Blake Ovard couldn’t be more supportive of the Irish and Celtic heritage if he were a shamrock-emblazoned jock strap. For two years now, he and his wife, Anne, have operated Gallery O at 817 Exposition by the skin of their teeth and, ostensibly, with a little green-tinted streak of luck…

Hindsight doesn’t interest Gerald Peters. He didn’t get where he is today by looking back or wrestling with “what ifs.” It’s more in his nature to look forward, to survey his mini-empire of art galleries in Manhattan, Santa Fe, and Dallas, to surround himself with people who take care of…