If you haven’t made seeing this band a year-end tradition by now, some curmudgeons may advise, “Don’t bother.” Not because the Old 97’s aren’t worth it, but because these holiday appearances inspire so much celebratory expectation and draw so many warm bodies that, unless you’ve been supporting them for years,…

A lot of ink has spilled over director Tim Burton lately in the wake of his latest release, Sleepy Hollow. Reviews are mixed, of course, just as they often are for Burton’s films. But this time out, it seems critics are no longer referring to the director’s constant sense of…

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The first time I saw the Turtle Creek Chorale, about five years ago, I had no idea what I was getting into. My mom and her friends had an extra ticket, and they cornered me because I didn’t have anything better to do that night. “It’ll be good for you,”…

Somewhere along the timeline, among those frenetic years between Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, the popularity of landscape painting took a nose dive. Traditional landscape’s unceremonious dumping was most noticeable before heavy Cubism but after early Fauvism — right around 1900 — and it’s not that the general population suddenly stopped…

My original plan was to be writing my book on England by Thanksgiving. I thought that by launching the novel off the emotional strain of being alone during the holidays, I’d really have something — some angsty independence I’d never experienced this time of year, as I’m usually warm in…

The first time I ever heard Georgia O’Keeffe disparaged, I was shocked: As recently as 1996, I was convinced, in the rote Southwestern tradition, that O’Keeffe was our region’s artistic grande dame. But as Aussie-cum-Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes put it in his book and PBS series American Visions,…

On the political side of the Dallas art scene, nothing in years has stirred more muttering expectation than Talley Dunn’s departure from the venerable Gerald Peters Gallery and the subsequent opening of her own venue not more than five miles away. The young Dunn’s name had become synonymous with Peters’…

“It’s one hollow thing meeting another hollow thing.” This is how London art critic Matthew Collings describes the hubbub over the Brooklyn Museum’s recent staging of the traveling exhibition Sensation. Collings, who has viewed the über-trendy Brit art show in all three of its venues — The Royal Academy in…

Visual artists make for lousy interviews. Not that paint-to-canvas genius needs verbal backup, but some of the most dismal conversations I’ve had were with visual artists trying to explain their work. They stumble over their own ideas. They circumvent the questions. They use plenty of hand gestures to subsidize what…

Fort Worth is a prime town for a film festival. It’s got that historic look (even if it is brand-new), it’s easy to negotiate by car, and its city center is accessible by foot. It’s big enough to offer some non-festival options for those suffering celluloid burnout, and small enough…

Surely it’s masking tape. When you closely scrutinize each of Kirk Hayes’ paintings — the wood grain, the torn paper, the meandering glue splatters — you eventually make out that it’s all actually paint. But when you walk to the next one, you’d swear the illusion has finally given way…

A few generations got their first taste of Julia Child through Saturday Night Live. In the late ’70s, one of Dan Aykroyd’s most popular impersonations was of the trilling, stoic female chef; she (or rather he, in gruesome drag) walked SNL viewers through the preparation of a turkey when –…

You’d think that the biggest annual fair in the nation’s biggest state would pack some genuine art. Not only crafts — quilts, pottery, and such — which a fair seems obligated to showcase, but some indication of the region’s artistic leanings. If the State Fair of Texas is supposed to…

Almost everyone has a ghost story, or at least knows someone who does. Hard to buy into the spirit world at all until you hear some completely sensible, non-hoodoo person tell their tale: the high-functioning yuppie cousin who had to move out of her San Francisco Victorian in the wake…

Have yourself nailed to the top of a Volkswagen Beetle, have yourself shot in the arm at close range, crawl over some broken glass. No? It’s all just another day’s work for Chris Burden, an artist who in the early 1970s introduced a confounded press to the concept of performance…

“Painting is dead” was a manifesto embraced by a swell of artists throughout the latter part of this century. As photography, moving film, sculpture, and conceptual art evolved, painting took on the rather unenviable role of static old grandpa: outdated, unsuited for dealing with modern concerns, narrow by its very…