Dallas News Blog

​Longtime Friends of Unfair Park remember this picture -- it was taken a little over one year ago, just as Washington Mutual's box on Greenville Ave. was put on the market after JPMorgan Chase said, "Nah, we're good." A busto bank sitting on the former home of a strip club (The Fare) perched right next door to a pawn shop -- it was almost like ... like ... like an art project! Which it is now: Former Observer art critic and Road Agent and troublemaker Christina Rees, now on staff at TCU, sends word this afternoon that she and a bunch o' artists are taking over the WaMu February 20-21 for an exhibition called Modern Ruin.

Writes Christina:

The two-day exhibition will be the only use for the million-dollar building before the demolition process begins the following week. The bank building is a truly modern ruin -- a building that never met its purpose, and only existed as potential activity, potential economy, and hoped-for growth.

Seeking to take advantage of the space -- its social and cultural connotations, its materials, and its presence as direct and immediate evidence of the current economic condition -- 15 artists will create work inspired by and in dialogue with the building. Some artists will alter the building's materials and corporate interior, while others will stage actions and interventions within, and still others will use the background of the space as context for their work.

A full list of the 15 participating artists follows, as well as the entirety of the release.

No doubt you're familiar with the work of Tony Bones (aka Soler aka Solyer aka Goya). Maybe you recall, if nothing else: My old pal Zac Crain had the graffiti artist provide the cover for his campaign comp waaaay back when. But here's the rare chance to see Tony at work -- in an intriguing, and apparently controversial, spray-paint promo done inside the local Oink Art LTD warehouse.

​When I was a kid, the only artist I knew by name was LeRoy Neiman -- musta been those Bicentennial Burger King giveaways, yech. So, I was kind of interested when a Friend of Unfair Park sent word that someone's auctioing off a Neiman original on eBay: Superbowl VI (Miami and Dallas). Only, what the ...?

Pardon, but that's $85,000? Seriously? Because, um, I see that only only six years ago, at the Playboy at 50 auction held at Christie's, the same piece sold for a little more than $31,000, after being guesstimated to go for slightly less than five figures. Besides, don't all LeRoy Neiman pieces from the '70s kinda look the same? Somewhere, I have this Time too.

​On Monday, the Dallas City Council's Quality of Life Committee's getting a visit from AT&T Performing Arts Center President and CEO Mark Nerenhausen, who will update the council on the AT&TPAC's Accomplishments in the First 90 Days. The briefing doc that was just posted is mostly a scrapbook of kick-ass moments: kind words from the press, a slide show of events come and gone and assorted "fun facts" (ooooh, a visitor from Blaxland, Australia!). Nerenhausen, of course, will fill in the blanks during the slide show on Monday -- and update the council on the progress of the Annette Strauss Artist Square and the City Performance Hall scheduled for a 2011 opening. Oh, right. Totally forgot about that one.

The committee will also get an update on community initiative events planned during NBA All-Star Week. The best part, most likely: The NBA Cares Day of Service planned for February 12, during which homes on Macon Street in South Dallas and Burnet Elementary will get makeovers.

Photos by Sam Merten

​An eclectic mix of folks packed the Bill and Margot Winspear Opera House last night as a jaw-dropping group of former Dallas Cowboys players reminisced during the taping of Glory Days, a television pilot scheduled to debut January 30 on KTVT-Channel 11 prior to finding a national outlet. Audience members could be seen in everything from formal wear to vintage No. 12 jerseys -- even fatigues, as more than 100 Fort Hood soldiers were on hand for the unique event.

Roger Staubach, Bob Lilly, Randy White, Tony Dorsett, Drew Pearson and Mike Ditka took the stage after Cliff Harris placed the Lombardi Trophy in between six leather high-back chairs, and Pat Summerall provided spectacular introductions for each gridiron legend. Lee Roy Jordan, Gil Brandt, Jay Novacek, Leon Lett and Alicia Landry were just some of the other big names on hand as Lesley Visser and Spencer Tillman asked questions from various areas in the audience.

For the most part, the evening consisted of rehashing stories that most die-hard Cowboys fans know by heart, but there was no denying the electricity of so many greats in such an impressive venue talking about a game they all clearly loved. And while it's doubtful anyone left dissatisfied, the three hours felt like being trapped watching The English Patient at times, and the Visser-Tillman combo proved to be nearly fatal as their questions showed a glaring lack of preparation and knowledge of the team's storied history.

​Speaking of Kettle Art ...

I noticed that on his blog yesterday, U.K.-based illustrator Damien Weighill posted a note that he's all set to make his Dallas debut at Frank Campagna's Deep Ellum gallery. The exhibition runs January 28 through February 2, but on the 30th, Weighill will be joined by Giggle Party, for whom he co-directed the brilliantly NSFW video for "Jason Bought a Hatchet," which, in mid-June of '09, Pete proclaimed "the best video of the year," just maybe. I sent Weighill a note yesterday, to which he responded today:

Truly exciting news about the art show. Obviously I've had the pleasure of working with Giggle Party on various artwork for a little while now and the idea for the show came from the band and John from Parade of Flesh. I'll be trying to peddle some kind of goods at the show but what form those goods will take is yet to be finalised. For certain, I'll have a couple of limited edition screen prints on sale.

It will be my first journey anywhere near Dallas so I'm unbelievably excited about coming over. Can't wait.

Like and wise.

In case you missed Mark Birnbaum and Manny Mendoza's mini-doc Dig Deep -- about the keeper of Kettle Art, Frank Campagna, and his work on Deep Ellum murals extinct and extant -- when it debuted at the Dallas Video Festival in November, Mark was kind enough to post it to Vimeo last night. See for yourself if Frank's a curmudgeon. Like you don't have 10 minutes to spare. Please.

Dig Deep from Mark Birnbaum on Vimeo.

​Says one baton-lovin' Friend of Unfair Park, Dallas Symphony Orchestra music director Jaap van Zweden received some early New Year's best-wishes courtesy the Los Angeles Times, which named him a classical-music "face to watch" in the coming year. Writes Mark Swed of the conductor unknown to locals a mere two years ago: Where's this Dutch treat been hiding all our lives?

From the evidence of Van Zweden's two CDs of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky symphonies recorded live in Dallas during his first season, the 50-year-old Dutch maestro (who is also a Juilliard-trained violinist and former concertmaster of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra) knows how to generate tense, tactile excitement in all kinds of music.

Van Zweden makes his Los Angeles Philharmonic bow in April. But, perhaps you've heard, he won't make his New Year's gigs with the DSO due to a bad shoulder and a note from his doctor.

Rachel Parker

One of the pieces auctioned off Saturday night. It looks even better on the other side.

​A hip crowd in cold-weather gear packed the warehouse at 511 W. Commerce Street Saturday night for Art Conspiracy 5, the flash-gallery show with paintings and mixed-media pieces made the night before and auctioned off for charity.

Since its first run inside the Texas Theater, the yearly art and music happening has drawn bigger crowds, and ever higher bids on the art pieces, each of them painted or constructed on same-sized panels. Bargain hunters still walked away from the last show with $20 pieces tucked under their arms, while big ticket items, including this Cabe Booth-painted Christopher Walken, fetched $700 or more. This year's beneficiary was Resolana, a Dallas nonprofit that creates training and rehabilitation programs for women in prison.

With Paul Slavens on as the night's emcee, the action shifted between live auctions and live bands. With the warehouse's bay doors thrown open, the crowd huddled under stand-up heaters to catch sets from RTB2, The Boom Boom Box, The Crash That Took Me and Telegraph Canyon.

You can check out this slide show for more photos from the auctions and the performances.

Update at 5:09 p.m.: And here's some well-edited video Ben Smithson took during ArtCon. Scored to The Crash That Took Me's performance Saturday night.

​We last spoke with Maria Munoz-Blanco, director of the city's Office of Cultural Affairs, about the Majestic Theatre in mid-May -- just as Dallas Summer Musicals Management Group was opting not to renew its contract to manage the 89-year-old city landmark, given a $1 million loss since taking it over in 1999. Since then, the city issued a request for proposals from would-be operators. And since the deadline was last Wednesday, I thought it might be a good time to check in with Munoz-Blanco and see how that went -- and what's next.

On the record, she won't say exactly how many proposals were submitted, but she does offer that "our goal was between three and five," given that it's not inexpensive to operate the theater. (She told Unfair Park in May that it costs some $1.2 to $1.3 million annually to run the joint.) "That was realistic, given the size of the pool of who does this kind of work. It's a complicated theater -- it's big -- and for it to make money you have to have the right kind of acts."

Now, the Office of Cultural Affairs and the city's purchasing department will sift through the proposals in the hopes of making a recommendation to the city council next month. In the meantime, Dallas Summer Musicals will continue to operate the theater; matter of fact, it has two productions on the Majestic schedule, including the current Christmas With the Rat Pack and a stage adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock's 39 Steps due next month. (Also on the sked for this month: Pink Floyd and Michael Jackson laser shows! Far out.)

Right now, she says, the theater's being used about "60 percent of the year." And while she knows there's "a perception" out there that the AT&T Performing Arts Center will cut into potential Majestic bookings, Munoz-Blanco says, "I'm confident that the Majestic will continue to operate as it always has" with a new operator in place at the beginning of 2010.

​Maybe you heard: Texas Ballet Theater debuted its Nutcracker at the Winspear on Friday, much to the displeasure of the Dallas-Fort Worth Professional Musicians Association, since the TBT isn't using, you know, musicians. It's a money-saving move necessitated by TBT's being close to broke, and, truth is, it's been going on for more than a year: The musicians' union protested the start of last year's season as well, held at the Majestic before the company's move to the AT&T Performing Arts Center.

Nonetheless, the DFWPMA has stepped up its outrage: The union's site now features a "call to action" in which it asks users to sign their name to a letter that says, in part, "By presenting classical ballet without live orchestra, TBT has fouled the art form, damaged its credibility, ripped off arts patrons and robbed musicians of their jobs. We believe it is in the public interest for Dallas-Fort Worth to have a great classical ballet company - with great live orchestral accompaniment to give it breadth and depth. Which is why, moments ago, Margo McCann, TBT's managing director, sent to media outlets a lengthy statement in which she explains the "heartbreaking ... decision to temporarily suspend live music accompaniment." The entirety of McCann's missive follows.

​In the December 14 issue of ForbesLife, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra's music director conducts a tour of his Dallas, which may not be your Dallas. Unless, that is, you tend arrive at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport after an 11-hour business-class flight from Amsterdam on KLM, drive to your digs at The Residences at the Ritz-Carlton and have Fearing's take-out delivered to your door, and can swing getting Stanley Korshak to open its doors whenever you're in need of new threads. In which case, this is your Dallas. Mazel tov.

This is among the Joe Kubert pieces Heritage Auction Galleries is selling off beginning this weekend

​The front page of this morning's New York Times Arts section draws our attention (heh) to the treasure trove of comic-book art sitting directly across the street from Unfair Park HQ: 83-year-old comic-book artist Joe Kubert has decided to sell off his collection of originals via Heritage Auction Galleries, beginning with an auction this weekend.

It's a wide-ranging, belongs-in-a-museum collection that dates back to 1944's illustration of the Seven Soldiers of Victory (among 'em, Green Arrow and Vigilante) and contains iconic war-story art (including the 1963 Sgt. Rock story "Young Soldiers Never Cry") and superhero stuff (this 1990 cover for The Greatest 1950s Stories Ever Told, featuring Superman, Batman, Green Lantern and the exhausted artist himself slumped over a drafting table).

The Oak Lawn-based Heritage, of course, cemented its rep as a pop-culture clearing house by selling off the comic-book collections of Nicolas Cage and Stan Lee; Thomas Jane is a regular customer for original pieces like Kubert's. So why's Kubert selling? "I have no undying love for any of the stuff," he tells The Times, which guesstimates that most of the pieces will sell for upwards of $3,000 to $4,000 -- reasonable. And who's buying? "The people who collect the stuff are so emotionally attached it," says Todd Hignite, Heritage's comics consignment director. This morning, my son begged me to buy him this piece for Hanukkah; I told him to save the front page of The Times's Arts section instead. He was not pleased -- too emotionally attached.

HOME? from Willie Baronet on Vimeo.

I hate that I couldn't make the first night of the final show in Hal Samples Gallery on Main Street -- it's become a sort-of home-away-from for my family and me in recent months. Alas, Willie Baronet's HOME? will be there till November 28, available by appointment only; the phone number's on the gallery's home page. Till then, then, Baronet's prepared for you Web browsers a slightly altered version of the video he debuted at the show last night; awful kind of him. Here too is an unedited excerpt from the statement he wrote for the show:

Since 1993 Ive been buying and collecting homeless signs from people on the streets, in subways, under bridges, in cities near and far. It began from an awkwardness I felt when Id pull up to an intersection and encounter a person holding a sign, asking for help. Like many people I wrestled with whether or not I was doing good by giving them money, wondered if they would spend the money on food or alcohol or drugs. Mostly I struggled with my moral obligations, and how my own choices contributed in conscious or unconscious ways to the poverty I was witnessing. I struggled with the unfairness of the lives people are born into, the physical, mental and psychological handicaps. And in my struggle I often avoided eye contact with those on the street, unwilling to really see them, and in doing so avoided seeing parts of myself.

​In this morning's item about the late, great Don Ivan Punchatz, Jeff Liles drops a comment to remind us of the TCU illustration prof's estimable contribution to the local music scene. Writes Jeff, he "also created that amazing cover illustration for Biting on Tin Foil, the first Three on a Hill vinyl EP on Deep Ellum Records," which Jeff actually released. (There are two copies for sale on the eBays.) Turns out, long-ago Three on a Hill frontman Peter Schmidt remembers how the cover came about like it was yesterday:

"I was friends with his son Greg, who used to come see Three on a Hill a lot," says Schmidt. "He's a nice guy himself. And one day, Greg said, 'Hey, my dad's an artist, why don't you get him to do the album cover?' At the very beginning, I didn't understand the scope of who he was. I just knew he was a real artist and my friend's dad, and I thought it would be neat. But as we went through the process, I very quickly got an idea about what a big deal he was."

National Lampoon Covers

Among Don Ivan Punchatz's most familiar works is the cover for the November 1974 National Lampoon.

​Spent the better part of the morning looking at the artwork of Don Ivan Punchatz, the New Jersey-born illustrator and TCU adjunct design professor for 40 years who died last Thursday in an Arlington hospital following cardiac arrest earlier this month. Punchatz's résumé is the stuff of pop-art-world legend: from National Geographic to National Lampoon to the National Portrait Gallery sort of says it all, but leaves out, well, almost everything. Hence, his lengthy obituary this morning in The New York Times, in which Steven Heller writes:

Punchatz was a skilled hyperrealist with a penchant for the fantastic and absurd. His cover art for works like Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy and Harlan Ellison's "Dangerous Visions" anthology was a striking blend of romantic metaphor and supernatural fantasy -- what one colleague called "elegantly weird." ... He was associated with the illustrative genre of fantasy known as magic realism, but he could also be a playful satirist for magazines like Playboy, Esquire and Rolling Stone.

Punchatz, who turned 73 last month and whose son Greg is best known for his work at Janimation in Dallas, was also the man who made Doom (or, at least, the legendary cover art for id's original offering). And his SketchPad Studio off Cooper Street in Arlington was where the likes of Gary Panter (best known, perhaps, as the head set designer for Pee-Wee's Playhouse) apprenticed on their way to fame.

Photos by Danny Fulgencio

A startling look down private health care's profit-hungry Pac-Man gullet.

​First off, how can something be a "flash mob" when local media's tipped off to the happening, oh, a week before it's scheduled with a press release? Second, it's awful hard to make a statement out of a conceptual-art event tied to health-care reform; yellow ponchos don't have quite the same impact as a "Youth in Asia Will Kill Your Grandma" sign. And: Don't promise thousands when you deliver ... oh ... a hundred, maybe?

There's a word for what happened Sunday, when the Dallas Professional Artists' Coalition took their health-care protest to the Arts District: anti-climactic. Donned in their canary-colored trash bags, PAC reps formed a Pac-Man (or so we think) as a metaphor for the health care industry's unbridled consumption, said organizers. (Actually, as you can see, they didn't so much form a Pac-Man so much as stand in the chalk outline of the video-game character.) It also had something to do with creating solidarity amongst local artists and building momentum toward "an art-friendly solution to the health care crisis." More photos of the happening follow after the jump.

Don't worry, though. We've got better dress-up items forthcoming from the weekend. Five words: "Princess Leia slave-girl costume." Happy early Halloween.

Paul Baker

​In April 2008, our Elaine Liner spoke with Dallas Theater Center Artistic Director Kevin Moriarty about his "once-in-a-lifetime, life-changing" meeting with DTC founder Paul Baker, who actor Charles Laughton once famously called "irritating, arrogant, nuts -- and a genius ... one of the most important minds in the world theater today." There have been countless tales told about Baker, the Hereford-born, Waxahachie-raised visionary behind the DTC, who came to Dallas in '59 to act as its first artistic director while also teaching at Baylor; there's even been a book by and about the man, Paul Baker and the Integration of Abilities, not to mention the Dallas-based Baker Idea Institute that continues to spread a gospel best illustrated in his adaptation of Hamlet, Hamlet ESP, which debuted at the Kalita Humphreys exactly 39 years tomorrow. Wrote Baker in the intro to the published play, in which three actors played the title role, "This is the clearest HAMLET yet to be presented." Take that, Bill Shakespeare.

But this morning, Elaine sends words of the final chapter: Baker died yesterday at his home in Waelder, southeast of Austin. Baker, who left the DTC in 1982, was 98. Mark Lowry at Theater Jones has the obituary, which runs just as the Dallas Theater Center moves into its new home at the Wyly Theatre in the AT&T Performing Arts Center.

Update at 6 p.m.: Theater Jones has posted this interview with Baker, recorded in May of this year. It's the first of several forthcoming, and in it he talks about "arriving in Dallas and not settling in as easily as he thought he would; former Dallas Morning News critic John Rosenfield; and the great Margo Jones."

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo's Saint Rufina, one of two pieces of artwork in the Meadows Museum stolen by the Nazis in 1941

​So, I just spoke with Robert Edsel concerning those two paintings at the SMU Meadows Museum his Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art publicly identified as having been stolen from the the Rothschild family in Paris in 1941 by the Nazis. He did not have much time to talk -- Edsel is, at this very moment, in Washington, D.C., attending a conference dealing with the restitution of the rightful owners of looted artwork, matter of fact. But he says he finds Meadows Museum director Mark Roglán's statement concerning the revelation -- which reads, in part, "neither Mr. Edsel nor his associates has ever presented SMU with any evidence that would question whether the paintings were properly restituted" -- both "bewildering" and "bothersome."

Why? Because, Edsel says, two and a half years ago, he first contacted Meadows and SMU officials about the likelihood that Bartolome Esteban Murillo's portraits of Seville's patron saints Justa and Rufina had been stolen by the Nazis. He says he asked to come over to view the pieces to check the backs for the official Nazi code indicating that they'd once belonged to the Rothschilds. At first, Edsel says, officials would only allow access to photos. "They said they did not believe their provenence was wrong," Edsel says. "And they send pictures, which wasn't what we wanted to see."

In April 2007, Edsel says, he and his investigators -- including Patricia Teter of the Getty Research Institute -- were allowed access to the painting themselves. At which point, they found what they were looking for.

Bartolome Esteban Murillo's Saint Justa

​A Friend of Unfair Park alerts us to the news that Robert Edsel -- founder of the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art, which scours the globe for the millions of pieces of art stolen by Hitler and the Nazis -- found two such items on the campus of his alma mater, SMU. Specifically, they were discovered in the Meadows Museum, according to yesterday's breaking-news release. They are: "a pair of famous paintings on display at SMU's Meadows Museum created by Spanish master Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1618-1682) of Seville's Patron Saints Justa and Rufina, estimated to be worth more than $10 million, are believed to have been stolen from the Rothschild family in Paris in 1941."

We've got calls into Edsel and Meadows director Mark Roglán for further information concerning the discovery. But, till then, there's this from the release:

The Nazi ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg) code evidencing Rothschild ownership is still visible on the stretcher bar of one of the paintings; it appears to have been rubbed off the other. The Monuments Men Foundation, recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal for its work preserving the legacy of these unknown heroes, which it received from the President of the United States at a White House ceremony, is continuing its research to document conclusively whether both paintings were properly restituted to the rightful owners prior to donation to the Meadows Museum.

The Monuments Men Foundation has provided the documentation for both discoveries -- here for Saint Justa; here for Saint Rufina. Ironically, on its Web site, the Meadows features a section called "Collections Provenance," in which it details the process by which it checks its acquisitions' origins. And the museum addresses the very issue raised by the new discovery: "Knowledge of an object's provenance is important for fully understanding the artwork's history -- this is especially critical when dealing with works that may have changed hands in Continental Europe during the Nazi era." Sprechen sie d'oh!

Update at 12:46 p.m.: Patti LaSalle, exec director in SMU's Office of Public Affairs, just sent Unfair Park a statement from Mark Roglán concerning Edsel's announcement. It follows after the jump. Spoiler alert: The director says everyone's always known these were pieces confiscated by the Nazis.

​Speaking of local music artifacts and eight-track tapes ...

Here's the poster for James "Big Bucks" Burnett's upcoming exhibit at the Barry Whistler Gallery. Because how else will you get people to look at 500 sealed Rutles eight-tracks "in their original shipping boxes"? Sigh. Dolly Python's amazing, but I kinda miss 14 Records.

Jennifer Conley/www.iliveindallas.com

From the opening of Guerilla Arts on Haskell Avenue this weekend

​Over on Renegade Bus, Joshua Goode brings word of "a major opening this week that could give the Dallas arts community the extra boost it has long needed": Guerilla Arts on Haskell Avenue, in the former home of the Viet Nam Veterans Motorcycle Club. It's the brainchild of Patrick Short, who spells out the nonprofit's mission in the 15-page manifesto posted to the GA Web site: "To nurture emerging contemporary artists in Texas by providing them with exhibition opportunities, work space and teaching experience through a paid residency."

Goode, himself an SMU BFA and visual artist, was there for the "jam-packed" opening weekend and notes that it felt more like Brooklyn than Dallas: "People crowded into the space openly engaging with the art and launching into a critical dialogue free of the usual Dallas pretention." According to the manifesto, the space is due to be fully realized by January.

Patrick Michels

Inside the Wyly Theatre yesterday, during the media tour

​In all the coverage of the AT&T Performing Arts Center's opening this week (and, remember, there's a free open house Sunday), I'd yet to see anything showing just how the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre interior morphs from intimate to epic, its key selling point. Then I stumbled across this page from Theatre Projects Consultants, the Connecticut-based firm charged with actually designing the "versatile, multiform space that can be configured for up to 575 seats in proscenium, thrust, traverse, and flat floor arrangements."

So happens, Theatre Projects hired Stewart Mayer to shoot some footage of the crew giving the theater a test-run two weeks ago. Mayer, the local cinematographer behind Kickass Camera, put together a remarkable time-lapse video; he and Theatre Projects were kind enough to let us offer it on Unfair Park. (Update: the high def version is included below Though this is a temp file -- a high-def version is coming tonight. So, for now, enjoy this one, featuring our Friday-morning musical selection circa 1927, the Dallas String Band's "Dallas Rag.") Mayer tells Unfair Park about the shoot: "It was fantastic. The whole building is a giant Transformer. It's bad-ass. It is absolutely amazing. It was really cool to see." See for yourself.

Patrick Michels

Winspear Opera House architect Norman Foster talks to reporters Thursday morning. Check out more photos from inside the Performing Arts Center in our slide show.

​

Patrick Michels

A view from the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House on Monday, when it made its official bow

​Another day, another review of the AT&T Performing Arts Center -- this one from Nicolai Ouroussoff of The New York Times, whose assessment graces the top of this morning's Arts section. (You remember Nic -- he's the one who called Cowboys Stadium "a somewhat crude reworking of old ideas" last month. And he was right.) He's far more impressed after this trip to town: He's stunned that the Dee and Charles Wyly Theater, which made its bow last night with a Bruce Willis howdy-do, is "so good" given that it was born out of a break-up between Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus, who no longer speak. The coolest part? The theater's ever-changing interior, of course, capable of accommodating productions enormous and intimate and in between. Still, a few complaints: "The walls and ceiling of an upper-level terrace are covered in artificial turf, a superficial flourish that is out of character with the rest of the design." And: "The building's unevenly striated aluminum surface, meanwhile, feels dull and its facades surprisingly tame."

As for Norman Foster's Winspear -- where, we learned yesterday, the seats are wide enough to accommodate big bottoms -- he says the lobby is a reworking of Charles Garnier's Paris Opera, while the main performance hall "is an elegant if familiar space that is more about putting you at ease than about sex appeal." (In other words: It's no Walt Disney Concert Hall, but what is?) So, the final verdict?

Taken with the Wyly Theater's design, [the Winspear] is a welcome contribution to this city's growing cultural district, helping to fill it out with the kind of strong, serious forms that can begin to give Dallas the cultural presence that it has never had. The no-nonsense approach of these buildings -- one cautiously experimental, the other more backward looking -- should fit nicely in our new era of cautious restraint, even if they were designed when the excesses were still not over.

There's also a slide show. Its headline: "A Cultural Heart for Big D." Aw.

Patrick Michels

​At 8 p.m. tomorrow, the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House gets its proper christening with performances by mezzo-soprano Denyce Grave, baritone Thomas Hampson, Morphoses choreographer Christopher Wheeldon in a piece commissioned for the AT&T Performing Arts Center's opening week. Given the Winspear's London roots -- it was designed, after all, by Foster + Partners -- the Guardian today weighs in with a what-for that asks whether Dallas is now home to the "opera theatre for the 21st century." Ed Pilkington also asks Spencer de Grey, the project's lead architect, about why the Winspear has 1,100 fewer seats than the Music Hall at Fair Park:

They reduced the number of seats from 3,300 in Dallas's old opera house to 2,200 -- slightly more than Covent Garden but substantially fewer than New York's Metropolitan Opera -- mainly to enhance the dramatic experience, but also partly in recognition that in this age, seats have to be larger. "People want wider seats, as basically they have bigger bottoms," de Grey said. "It's a very compact space. People can't believe it has so many seats in such a small area."

On a related note, will Spinal Tap ever play the Winspear? Should.

Patrick Michels

New York-based artist Leni Schwendinger under her first of five Main Street Garden light sculptures Monday night, displaying its autumn color scheme.

​Light sculpture artist Leni Schwendinger and her team spent Monday evening downtown, programming the seasonal color schemes on the first of her installations on the site that, come November 5, will be the new Main Street Garden.

The first of her SpectraScape structures is more or less complete: a pair of green glass panels, each bending at a 90-degree angle into a roof. Seen from the right angle, Schwendinger pointed out, the roofs form a "V" that echoes the modern shape of the old Statler Hilton across the street. The park will include five of these setups, each with seating underneath and, of course, a line of multicolored lights crawling along the top.

At 9:15 Monday night, Schwendinger said they'd just finished programming each of the four color schemes the installations will display over the course of a year, plus an all-white display that'll run for about 20 minutes each night at dusk. After that, she said, the light program will run clear on through till, you know, "whenever the bars close."

Photos by Patrick Michels

Mayor Tom Leppert and council member Angela Hunt closed out Monday morning's ceremony with some thespian assistance.

​

​Monday's the big day -- the grand opening of the AT&T Performing Arts Center, which kicks off at 8 a.m. with South Pacific star Keala Settle performing the "The Star-Spangled Banner" before AT&T PAC president and CEO Mark Nerenhausen, Mayor Tom Leppert and other city officials play ball. Hence yet another national-press piece concerning the AT&TPAC's impact on Dallas and downtown -- this one from former Observer-er Tom Korosec, writing for Bloomberg News that it's just as well the original Arts District plan, conceived in '78 and formalized in '82 by Sasaki Associates didn't work out as quite as planned. Says Margaret McDermott, "We were lucky it failed." (Alexander Garvin, who wrote critically about it in his 2002 book The American City: What Works, What Doesn't, would agree.)

Still, as Newsweek pointed out one week ago, a performing arts center doesn't a city make. And ancillary developments around the AT&TPAC have been put on hold for myriad reasons, most of which, say Lucy Billingsley, rhyme with "economy." To which SMU prof and Dallas historian Darwin Payne says, "Dallas civic leaders and big-money people love to say we're the biggest and best. I can't imagine another city trying to build it in quite the same way."

An abstract Duvan Lopez Yepez painting, among the Derrill Osborn items up for grabs next week.

​When my former colleague Christina Rees says Dallas print media needs to get off its ass and properly cover the visual arts, this probably isn't exactly what she means. Nevertheless, I now direct your attention to the 350-plus cow paintings and sculptures and whatnots being auctioned off October 14 at the Dallas Auction Gallery per the instructions of their owner, Derrill Osborn, the former longtime head of Neiman Marcus' men's fashion division (a "men's wear maestro," matter of fact) who wants to clear the clutter from his Oak Lawn town home. And lest you think this a novelty item, well, it did merit a piece (scroll down) in this morning's New York Times, in which Osborn, owner of the greatest facial hair in the history of follicles and an exquisite dresser, explains his love affair with four-legged art: "People don't normally associate cows with elegance. But this is the best of the best in the bovine world. It isn't the potholders, dishrags and ice cream scoops you might imagine."