Forget sex and eating. As anyone who ever stared down a deadline can tell you, the strongest human drive is the urge to plagiarize. If you’re honest, you limit the lifting to ideas, motifs, the occasional metaphor or turn of phrase. To borrowing from yourself and, on occasion, your dreams…
It seems odd to call Pillsbury and Peters Fine Art’s new show of Leon Kossoff’s work “timely.” But it is, even though the London-based painter remains, at 75, what he has always been: a throwback. A member of the so-called London school, Kossoff is a figurative painter, an expressionist who…
Ah, summer. The season of intellectual light lifting, of beach reading and crowd-pleasing museum shows, welcome respites from heat and headlines alike. Between WorldCom and Nasdaq and Al Qaeda, these are times that try Norte Americano souls. And so while there is no ideal moment for a show like De…
As with any earthly endeavor, museum-going is governed by certain immutable, objectively verifiable laws. Laws like Biederman’s Razor: The worse the institution, the greater its penchant for puffery. Fortunately, there is a corollary to this axiom. While far too many major museums put a postmodern faith into spin, quality shows…
I have a weakness for quixotic figures. In literature and in life, I’ve always been a sucker for the wisecracking cynic, the jaded guy (or gal) whose hard-boiled façade hides a marshmallow heart. Call me a hopeless romantic, call me unrealistic, call me what you will, just call me when…
In one of his finest essays from the mid-’90s, an exquisite savaging of Mother Teresa, the columnist, critic and professional gadfly Christopher Hitchens leads with an anecdote about Private Eye, a defunct satirical magazine. As Hitchens tells it, when the editors and writers of Private Eye were casting about for…
Terry Allen, a West Coast conceptualist with a Southwestern twang, has been at the scene of just about every art-world crime in the past three decades. It isn’t entirely his fault. Born in Kansas, raised in Lubbock, Allen attended L.A.’s Chouinard Art Institute (now Cal Arts) in the mid-’60s, which,…
The way the story goes, a famous Hollywood mogul was once asked why he kept so many screenwriters working on so many scripts. The reply: If you lock a dozen monkeys in a room with a dozen typewriters, eventually one will bang out Hamlet. I don’t know whether the movie…
Had some wickedly funny novelist set out to satirize the excesses of contemporary art, she could do worse than to open the action at Wonder, the current show at the University of Dallas’ Haggerty Gallery. The place to start would, in fact, be with Bettie Ward’s CV, which sits at…
John Alexander has led the most charmed of painterly lives. True, he didn’t start out that way; he was born in Beaumont, raised among swamp critters and fundamentalists and educated in the sticks (B.A. from Lamar University, M.F.A. from Southern Methodist University). His inspiration to paint probably came as he…
It’s no fun to beat up on the Dallas Museum of Art. Oh, sure, there’s a certain impish glee to be had in countering the pols’ and the flaks’ and the hacks’ (read: Janet Kutner’s and Mike Daniel’s) insistence on pretending it’s anything other than the most mediocre of flyover…
The Kimbell Art Museum’s new Murillo exhibition is the kind of show the Kimbell does best: the meat-and-potatoes old masters monograph. This time, the Kimbell has set out to resuscitate a rep that has spent the better part of 150 years in decline, marshaling its own resources and borrowing from…
Ron Kirk insists he is neither optimist nor pessimist, cynic nor Pollyanna. “I’m a realist,” he explains during a quiet break from campaigning in deep East Texas. “I’ve had to deal with life as it is.” Because he’s a realist, he recognizes some harsh truths. Kirk knows, for example, that…
In the 174 years since Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes died, he has been celebrated, explicated, copied, collected and feared by everyone who matters. Painters from Delacroix to the YBAs (Young British Artists) have looked to him for inspiration. Writers from Baudelaire to Robert Hughes have sung his praises…
And so, adieu to 2001. The critic is older and crankier, a bit more gray but essentially the same, still given to muttering about “standards” and premature curmudgeonhood. The world, on the other hand, seems to have changed. We are embarking on a new century, finally, by the calendar and…
I remember when I realized Dale Chihuly had entered some sort of parallel art universe. It was during the mid-’90s, and I was visiting my parents, who a few years back retired to one of those depressingly uniform, pastel-hued Florida seaside communities. We were sitting there, on my mother’s peach…
History, Bonaparte once observed, is a set of lies agreed upon. Thus when art-world eggheads bemoan “the end of art history,” or mourn the passing of the progressive historical narrative, or invoke unreadable dead German philosophers, they are really just misty for the not-so-old days when everyone agreed. Until the…
By the standards of contemporary photographers, Shelby Lee Adams is a modest man. He dabbles not in the black art of celebrity portraiture, dwells not in the abstract zone, couldn’t care less about the zeitgeist. The label that fits best would be “documentary photojournalist,” though Adams’ work is not quite…
It’s hell being an art-world skeptic. In many ways, the art critic’s gig recalls Pascal’s famous wager with non-believers. Since life is a cosmic crapshoot, Pascal argued, the pragmatist will always bet in favor of God’s existence. If you’re right, and he exists, you’ve won everything; if you’re wrong, and…
As the joke goes, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. And if you doubt it, hie yourself down to shows at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary and Photographs Do Not Bend, both of which are featuring work from the distant (for Texas) past. The MAC’s show features 96 works by…
For a nation founded in a fit of religious rebellion, set up to serve as a city on a hill, America has produced remarkably little first-rate religious art. There are pastoral visions aplenty, and museumfuls of history painting; there is nature-painting-as-religion (Church), and abstraction-as-religion (Rothko), and even furniture-as-religion (e.g., Shaker)…
For those who care about art, reading art ‘zines and perusing “me too” exhibitions of contemporary art–which are, sad to say, the majority–can become dangerously deceptive obsessions. Too often, the results are akin to watching a Martian anthropologist or not-too-bright teen-ager try to divine the meaning of human life from…
