Essay

I attended a new writers’ conference in Minneapolis over the weekend, hosted by the Walker Art Center. It was called “Superscript: Arts Journalism and Criticism in a Digital Age.”

"Just keep pushing the boundaries of the discipline of art."

I feel for anyone who wants to write for a living and won’t get to do so in an office with other editors and writers.

The wunderkammers we experience in museums today are less about the objects they contain, and are more exhibits about exhibiting, displays about display.

"Well, I decided to have really nice cars rather than children."

In 1988, and an art-appreciation class introduced me to Chris Burden along with the idea that a person would have himself shot or crucified or potentially electrocuted to death for the sake of art.

A brief meditation on the size of Texas and the variety of people and concerns as it relates to art communities, cross-pollination, and even Glasstire.

Preventing awfulness should not be the aim of a public art selection process.

Scenes from the crowd at this year's Art Car Parade in Houston.

I pointed my Instagram-primed iPhone up at the blocks, tilting back until the espresso I forgot I was holding dumped all over my face and collar. I blame you, Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis!

The Art World has undergone a second pop invasion—this time it’s authentic pop, and The Museum of Modern Art has slipped into a warm bath with its razor to kill itself like a Roman Senator.

I’m 80% sure that Dallas is still not an art destination and doesn’t deserve the frequency with which it appears in the travel sections of other cities’ magazines and newspapers.

At that moment, I understood through an experience what I’ve known intellectually for a long time; the greatest strength of American capitalism lies in its ability to steal and neutralize the authentic, local culture and art of the enslaved, the poor, and the dissatisfied.

Pop culture’s nostalgia obsession has reached an absurd level, and every decade since the beginning of the last century is getting the romance treatment to a startling degree.

Just as Dallas holds up its Arts District as its centralized crowning achievement, the city's unassuming margins are looking increasingly seductive.

I remember an artist's talk in Junction, sitting in the back, loosening my belt from lunch, and seeing the guy next the me without his shoes on - it was James Surls.

I asked Robert Earl Keen why he loves the movie. He immediately cited its understatement. “So much is left to the audience’s imagination. It allows one to feel like a participant.”

It was those congenial moments between near strangers that intensified the scope of our small, yet potent symposium here in the middle of the Plains.

When I joined the faculty at Texas Tech in 2001 as a tenure-track professor, the idea of merging my studio art, which consisted of paintings of daisies and powder boxes on colorful backgrounds, with the word research taunted me.

The pièce de résistance of the Outdoor Art Exhibit in Eastland, Texas, is a 12-foot-tall cylinder painted to resemble one of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans located in the parking lot of the Dairy Queen.