Food at Openings
Best: The
late and lamented Boyd Gallery
Worst: The
MAC’s Blue Yule Blue Punch
Art Talks
Best: Dave
Hickey on Graduate Art Education, at
UTD
Worst: Egyptian
show at the Kimbell, chats any of the other press people
at The Nasher — Nasher himself was wonderful.
Institutional PR
Best: Randall
Garrett of Plush creates the most quoteworthy
press releases in the North Central Texas area, maybe the art
universe.... although lately they've been peating and repeating
at Spam
levels.
Worst The
MAC ties with the CAC. The MAC changes PR persons as often as their
socks and inundates websters with E-mails in big, bold, all cap
letters with grammar and spelling errors intact. Then they get all
upset
when one asks them to slow it down some.
The CAC doesn't do (or respond
to) E-mail and does not advertise.
Invitations
Best:
Valley House has quality
type and image; Pan American's are consistently colorful
and elegant,
Worst: Hands
down winner is the Arlington Museum of Art. They still love their
tiny, nearly illegible typefaces but lately have discovered
grunge typography from the early 90s. Never mind finding a start
or end date for their events, just reading these things
is a headache.
Performance Art
Best: Robert
Boland's Running
Spiral at the Casket Factory by South Side
on Lamar June 21, 2003
Worst — The
woman at The Cedars "Art" tour in November who
sat there and thought about
art on her empty walls.
Gallery Closing
Most
tragic: The Boyd
Least tragic: Florence
or Gallery VIII
top
Museum Press Preview
Best: Nasher — great
art in several dimensions. A bright sun box full of art.
Worst: Egyptian
show at Kimbell — is this stuff art or archeology?
A dark, dank tomb of dead art.
Press Preview Lunch
Best: The
Kimbell
Worst: the
DMA's tuna surprise with olives
Worst
Runner Up: Nasher
Staff Intern
Best: CJ
Davis, when he worked for Craighead Green
Worst: The
tall blonde intern at The MAC who insisted that there had never been
installation art in Dallas before Alex
Coyle's.
Gallery Turnover
Best: When
Edith Baker Gallery turned into Cidnee Patrick — and
Edith still happily works there. The fare has transitioned
slowly but
noticeably while most of what made Edith Baker Gallery great
is still in evidence.
Worst: Ted
Pillsbury leaving Pillsbury Peters
Post Graduate 500X Art Spaces
Best: Gray
Matters, Plush, The
Casket Factory,
Art Consultants
Best: Katherine
Wagner and Tom Adams at CAC — they left no stone
unturned in their sincere critique of the dysfunctional
private
art school's way of doing business.
Worst: Richard
Brettell for Southside on Lamar — he left no resident
Dallas artist unevicted.
Suburban Art Center
Best: Irving
Art Center
Runner
up: Plano
Worst: Irving
Art Center annex
top
Egregious PR Goofs
Most:
When JR asked for the names of artists in a show at Craighead
Green, they sent a list — complete
with home addresses, phone numbers and Social Security Numbers.
When
JR responded to warn them, they said, "Something many people
do not know is that anyone can get your ss # on their own."
We're not citing the gallery,
because we believe the goof really was an accident, despite their
shocking response.
Least: Any
of the growing number of galleries, schools, museums, art centers,
etc. that refuse to list artists in their shows on their invitations,
yet rely on artists' work to further their own.
Gallery
Best: Pillsbury
Peters when Ted Pillsbury was still
there.
Worst: Name
it and claim it.
New Gallery
Best: The
Art House on Routh shows and sells only Dallas artists, and
they're open late, giving a lie to The MAC's claim to be "the
only place for art after dark."
Strangest
Concept: The
MADI Museum and Gallery at The Kilgore Law Center in Lower Oak Lawn.
Dated mediocre international geometric art by nice, well-meaning
folk.
Museum
Best: Fort
Worth Modern or is it the Kimbell?
Worst: Dallas
Museum of Art
Hypiest Hype
Worst: 100
Hours at the DMA, during which the permanent collection and
the sculpture garden weren't open after dark.
Art Auction or Party
Best: EASL
Worst: CAC — so
dark you couldn't see the art, which nobody — including the
MC — was promoting.
top
Art School
Best: Brookhaven— fabulous
faculty.
We aren't mentioning
North Lake College here, because most of their faculty are Supporting
Members of DallasArtsRevue, and that would be way too prejudiced
of us, even though they're obviously the best bunch of art educators
in the Greater Dallas area.
Worst: Well,
you decide.
SMU's faculty
show last year displayed a lot of talent and no small about
of intellectual B.S., but most of all it displayed cold disregard
for passion.
Then there's
the Creative Arts Center's crumbling building; their Board
President characterizing the faculty as "a bunch of children" — or
their refusal — in the middle of a hot Texas summer — to
buy a room air conditioner for one, stuffy, hot classroom,
even though they had money in the bank and students were complaining
bitterly.
Art Tour
Best: White
Rock Lake Artists Studio Tour — good artists and craftspersons in
a tour scatterd across the eastern middle parts of Dallas,
often far from White Rock Lake's environs.
Worst: We
don't know about the quality of art shown, because we don't visit
art events that won't list participating artists — like
The Junius Heights Artists Porch Sale, which refused to name
the artists in the sale, even after we asked three times.
Web Site
Questionable: The
DCCA site has style and elan, but it's almost never updated.
Not uncommon in the gallery and art center world.
High School Art Show
Best: The
Dallas Museum of Art's annual spring student show.
Worst: UTD.
By the end of the show, UTD still had not labeled the work.
Ch-ch-changes
Best
Name Change: Edith
Baker to Cidnee Patrick, where Edith Baker still happily works
Worst
Name Change: Originally, it was ACT (Artist's
Coalition of Texas), then in a long, slow succession: D-ART,
D'Art, D-Art, DVAC and now The Dallas
Center
for Contemporary Art, which we are told to call "The Comporary" but
is also widely known as "The
Contempt," (a
name JR only wishes he had coined).
Dishonorable
Mention: The
Texas Fine Arts Association changed their venerable name to Art
House, becoming the 423rd one of those we know about, so far.
There were already two in Dallas.
Honorable Mention for
Moving: Conduit
Gallery slipping out of parking-starved Deep Elm highrise into
The Trinity Industrial Area's Design District.
Ethnic Culture Center
Best: The
outside of the Latino Culture Center. We’ve never
been invited inside.
Worst: The
White Cultural Center in North Dallas — because it never
existed. We ran facetious listings of events on DARts calendars,
but nobody
ever caught the joke, although one reader wrote in for a clarification
of the SUV show.
Art Center Director
Best: David
Fisher of the Bath House Cultural Center — for
including a wild variety of exhibitions accessible by a wild
variety of Dallas artists of every conceivable category..
Membership Exhibition
Best: The
last several years at The MAC
Worst: Dallas
Center for Contemporary Arts. Supposedly unjuried, although somehow
the DCCA managed to delete all the really bad artists (and most
of the members) from the show.
See J
R's alternate take.
Ecclectic Show Lineup
Most: The
Bath House Cultural Center — all over the map, representing
many cultural groups and many tastes
Least: Ice
House — The Virgen and other religious shows flys in the
face of the Separation of Church and State in City-run institutions.
Parking Facilities
Best: Valley
House has valet (but if you hate valet,
then it’s one of the worst,
because you sometimes have to park a half mile down the street.)
Almost
Worst: Craighead-Green/Cidnee Patrick, unless
you get there early, you’ll have to park on the street
or down the block. If you park in the adjacent lot, the lawyers
will have you towed off.
Worst
Worst: The MAC on any opening night involving
local artists, which is — luckily, if you need to park
close — becoming rare.
Gallery Event
Best: Vance
Wingate’s wedding reception at Gray Matters
Dallas Art Critic
Best: Charles
Dee Mitchell
top
Art Reviews in Print
Best: Carolyn
Biederman in the Dallas
Observer, except she doesn’t write for them anymore,
or at least they don't publlish her — probably because
galleries don’t buy ads. Her Pinhead Monet
in Algiers review of that Dallas Museum of Art show
was priceless.
Worst: Regurgitated
press releases at The
Dallas Morning News. For
decades, publicity flacks have considered it a boon when DMN's
Janet Kutner signed one of our carefully worded press releases
and published them. Luckily, she
goes out of town for most of their reviews
these days.
Thank You Letter
Best — a
letter from EASL with everybody on
the Board of Director's signatures and greetings, hand-written
on
the back
of an envelope — spontaneous, informal, and very much
appreciated. JR pinned it on his Friend's Wall.
Worst — CAC’s
Blue Plate Special letter thanking editor JR for contributing
a DARts
Membership and a DARts Subscription. The letter arrived
two months after the auction, and CAC has still (as of October
2004, more than a year later — it never did.) not informed us who
made the winning bids, so we could deliver the promised
Membership and DARts Subscription.
Gallery Reception Attire
Best: Randall
Garrett’s plastic naugahide suit and
shoes with no socks
Art Show Sculpture Concept
Weirdest: Frances
Bagley’s draped cows at Essential
Space
Worst: Furniture
shows at the DMA
Fellow Press Preview Attenders
Best: the
French Architectural Magazine contributor / Houston architectural
professor who chatted with us at the Nasher press preview
Worst: the
ladies from SocialWhirl Dot
Com who kept asking whether the Nasher would host weddings.
Public Art Installation
Best: Phillip
Lamb & Susan Magilow's intricate, high tech installation
at Love Field
Worst: All
those sad sick "art" attempts redesigned and/or
destroyed by the City committees set up to keep creativity
out of Dallas
City Parks and public buildings.
Wall Art
Best: Tunnel
Vision
Worst: Yet
Another uninspired Virgen of Guadalupe at The MAC or almost
anywhere else.
Cultural Icons
Best: the
pegasi on top of the Magnolia Building downtown
Worst: the
plethora of badly decorated fiberglass pegasuses
top
Art Movies
Best: Frida,
color, music, special effect paintings coming to vidio life
Worst: Max,
supposedly telling the story of young Adolph Hitler's failed
artistic efforts, even though it did spout great gobs of fascinating
early 20th Century art philosophy.
Artsy Neighborhood
Best: Lakewood
Second
Best: Southside/The
Cedars before Richard Brettell
Worst: Deep
Ellum
Second Worst: Southside
on Lamar after Richard
Brettell
Gallery Name
Best: Forbidden
Worst: anything "Contemporary"
