A wag once defined philosophy as unintelligible answers to insoluble problems. Alas, contemporary art can too often be defined as semi-intelligible answers to questions that are simply not worth asking. Take, for example, the art world’s preoccupation with French eggheads and “simulacra.” At the risk of getting metaphysical, the supposed…

Judging from the superlatives being tossed about on the occasion of Ed Ruscha’s retrospective, he has finally shed regional cult-figure status, emerging as a full-fledged International Art Star. “If you can catch the traveling retrospective of Mr. Ruscha’s 40-year career, you should do so,” wrote The New York Times’ Michael…

It’s summertime, and the living is easy–so easy, in fact, that I’ve given myself an assignment. Sooner or later, every bona fide art critic has to tackle the 800-pound intellectual gorilla of modern art, and so my poolside reading consists of the four-volume edition of Clement Greenberg’s collected essays and…

It doesn’t take much time wandering the inaugural exhibition at SMU’s Meadows Museum to realize that Santiago Calatrava is no fool. A dreamer, certainly. A weirdo, for sure. A genius, perhaps. But when it comes to building a reputation, the Spanish-born architect and engineer is no quixotic figure. At 49,…

The damnedest things happen in (early) middle age. At first it’s only a little scary; you see a few crow’s-feet, you wake up a bit stiff, you agree with a Wall Street Journal editorial. Next thing you know, you’ve got metastasizing gray and you’re muttering about “standards” and, worse yet,…

Southern Methodist University has always suffered from a bit of a split personality. Its better-known persona is as one of the nation’s top-tier party schools, a place of awe-inspiring intellectual perversity, full of not-too-bright frat boys and Idlewild debs and hometown princesses with eating disorders. It is a university with…

Renee Gimpel, art dealer, diarist and connoisseur of the human comedy, knew almost everyone in the art market during the tender years of the 20th century and left us wickedly insightful anecdotes about many. One of his best concerns the Fricks, millionaire industrialists who collected old masters, and whose collection,…

Dallas has always hated its image. If you want to see goose bumps sprout on local politicos and moguls, just allude to the stereotype: the burg that killed Kennedy, full of squillionaire John Birchers and real-live Beverly Hillbillies, where every other car is a pickup and every other pickup packs…

Al Capone is supposed to have groused that, “When I sell liquor, it’s called bootlegging; when my patrons serve it on silver trays on Lake Shore Drive, it’s called hospitality.” He would, no doubt, have enjoyed the fancy airs surrounding the Dallas Museum of Art’s new show, Henry Moore: Sculpting…

Nobel laureate Gabriel Garca-Márquez once remarked that the Latin-American strongman is the only myth Latin America has foisted upon the First World. He is wrong. In the art world, an equally pervasive myth endures, that of the hysterical, polemical Latin artist. It is a stereotype at least as durable as…

Though the modern museum’s roots go back to the Age of Enlightenment, in terms of sheer numbers, the recently departed century was its Golden Age. According to the Association of Art Museum Directors, its 180 member museums hold more than 14,000,000 works of art. These statistics don’t begin to account…

For contemporary artists living and working outside the world’s art centers, regionalism has long been a high-risk, low-reward career path. To choose it is to work in a style whose heyday is long gone, to opt for a future with built-in limitations, to abandon all hope of ever being The…

Last spring, as part of a New York Times series titled “Writers on Writing,” mystery novelist and satirist Carl Hiaasen groused about what must rank as one of the central artistic problems of the late 20th century. “Real life,” Hiaasen noted, “is getting way too funny and far-fetched…Fact is routinely…

It’s Christmastime, and amid the manses on Beverly Drive, their great oaks encased in tens of thousands of tiny lights, and amid the gaudy reindeer and the lawn sleighs and the thousand-dollar light bills, there’s a house that perfectly expresses my mood as I crawl through Dallas galleries. It’s quiet,…

As an area of academic study, art history is a ridiculously young enterprise. To be sure, formal art education has long existed, and the European aristocracy could always just look at the walls. But the formal, ivory-tower study of art history qua history is a recent development. Begun at Harvard…

In the summer of 1946, while on holiday along the French Riviera, Pablo Picasso wandered to the nearby village of Vallauris, a Provençal town where artists and craftsmen had been turning out pottery since at least Roman times. Picasso was 65 years young, and somewhat at loose ends. Though he…

If you’re bucking for a spot in the annals of art history, you’d best be in the right metropolis at the right time. Certain cities at certain times seem to act as giant petri dishes, experimental laboratories producing remarkable achievements in the arts and sciences. Think Florence during the Renaissance,…

In an essay titled “The Decline of the City of Mahogany,” the art critic, sometime fisherman, and all-around Aussie curmudgeon Robert Hughes frames an interesting hypothetical. What if, he posits, “there were only one copy of each book in the world, fought over by multimillionaires and investment trusts and then…

We all have our little secrets, and it’s out-of-the-closet time with one of mine: Try as I might, I find it hard to dislike Dan Rizzie. There are plenty of reasons to cast a hypercritical eye on the SMU-educated artist, currently the subject of shows at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary…