The 50th anniversary of piano legend Van Cliburn’s Tchaikovsky competition victory in Moscow isn’t until April 14th, but Fort Worth, home of the Cliburn Competition, begins celebrating tomorrow. Cliburn’s shocking win, at the age of 23, during the height of the Cold War, helped ease, at least temporarily, American’s fears about Soviet superiority.
Go here to listen to a report from 90.1’s Bill Zeeble on the celebration plans in Fort Worth.
NPR’s Scott Simon interviews Van Cliburn for Weekend Edition. Listen or read here.
The party may be Saturday at PanAmerican ArtProjects in the trendy Dragon Street gallery area, but the space that matters is in Oak Cliff, an overgrown, 35-acre site along Jefferson Boulevard. The woody, flood-plain lot has an old house on it (right) and a large, skeletal chunk of concrete trestle running right through it (left) – from the days of the long-defunct Interurban Rail Line.
La Reunion Tx hopes to transform that unusual site into a gallery, performance space and arts residency, hosting working artists there from one week to one year. And to do that the nonprofit group has held an architecture competition, Make Space for Art, with a $6,000 prize. The deadline has passed, the submitted plans have been judged and the winner is to be announced Saturday at the PanAmerican party — along with a slide show of all the entries and music from the Escalator Maintenance Society, the experimental side project of Tim Ruble and Jason Roberts of the Happy Bullets.
It has been predicted for awhile, and now it’s happened. According to the Pew Project on the States, five states currently spend more on prisons than on higher education.
No, one of them isn’t Texas.
Those states are (in order of spending the most proportionally on prisons in 2007): Vermont, Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut and Delaware. The state spending the least on prisons relative to higher education was Minnesota, where for every dollar spent on higher education only 17 cents was spent on corrections. The average for all states was 60 cents, nearly double the 32 cents spent 20 years earlier. Only three states saw gains in spending on higher education, relative to corrections: Alabama, Nevada and Virginia.
Prisons are definitely winning the budget race: “During the last 20 years, corrections spending has increased by 127 percent on top of inflation, while spending on higher ed has increased only 21 percent.”
Dallas’ arts magnet — the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts — is set to move into its old/new campus in the Arts District later this spring. Spire Realty Group is marking the occasion by showcasing 24 student sculptures in the Scrap Can Be Beautiful exhbition in the lobby of Bryan Tower, the largest building Spire owns downtown.
Caleb S. Smith, president of the Dallas-based company, welcomed his neighbors back Thursday at the gallery opening. Coordinated by Gail Sachson, the exhibition, which runs through April, features works by 19 students. They use sheet metal, steel bar, gears, springs and spark plugs in both abstract and figurative shapes — flowers, birds, insects, fish and the animal-like “Colossus” by senior Socrates Narvaez, above.
Two years ago, Booker T moved into the decidedly funky Nolan Estes Plaza in south Oak Cliff while its original 1922 home was gutted (the historical front facade retained) and replaced by a new, $55 million facility, designed by Allied Works Architecture. Although originally scheduled to move into the building over the school’s spring break in March, students and faculty were told this week that the building would not be completely ready (and pass inspections) by March 17. [Read more →]
Speaking of the Arts District — well, I was, anyway — you might recall my vow to keep up with Domenic Cavendish’ series of columns for the New Statesman about “the connections between culture and regeneration.”
In his latest report, Cavendish examines Liverpool, which has been declared this year’s European “Capital of Culture.” This has seemingly triggered a huge economic revival for the gloomy seaport: ”Liverpool One, coming into being like a shiny, futuristic metropolis-within-a-metropolis. With £1bn of private investment behind it, this labyrinth of sleek glass and steel is the biggest retail-led city-centre regeneration project in Europe.”
But will the result be what Liverpudlians really wanted — other than local developers, of course? Reading his report, one inevitably thinks of the Victory development, American Airlines Center, the Arts District, even the Trinity River Project — every plan that has been touted as downtown Dallas’ salvation. But are they? And how does anyone determine such a complicated, socioeconomic cause-and-effect?
Cavendish has found someone who is trying to do just that.
News stories about Dallas’ Arts District often try to cite the total price tag, which is slippery (do you include the underground parking garage? What about all the related civic improvements, like the re-working of Flora Street?). I’ve been guilty of the same thing. Tossing around a (possible) billion dollar figure is not just bragging, though. It does give some indication of the city’s investment in culture as a downtown revitalization project, if nothing else.
But to give some humbling sense of scale, here’s Foreign Policy magazine’s list of the world’s biggest construction projects currently underway. These include Las Vegas’ CityCenter,which despite the civic-sounding name is actually being built by MGM: the “largest privately funded construction project in the United States … a multi-use plaza with three hotels, a casino, luxury apartments, and retail and dining facilities, [costing] as much as $8.4 billion.”
Whatever the exhibition’s aesthetic or scholarly value, it was easy enough to conclude that the Kimbell Art Museum’s current show, Picturing the Bible: Early Christian Art, was going to be popular in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Just consider the number of superchurches here.
Ancient traditions have long been viewed as more a “Catholic thing” than an evangelical Protestant one, so this cross-faith trend is notable. It’s wide and deep enough that it even has enumerated dangers, including traditionalism (”being unwilling to see the flaws in the early church’s traditions”) and eclecticism (”selectively appropriating ancient practices without regard to their original purposes or contexts”). Says Baylor University professor D. H. Williams, author of Evangelicals and Tradition:
Who would have thought, a decade ago, that one of the most vibrant and serious fields of Christian study at the beginning of the 21st century would be the ancient church fathers? There has been an opening of new avenues, especially among free-church Protestants, by the almost overnight popularity of bishops and monks, martyrs and apologists, philosophers and historians who first fashioned a Christian culture 1,500 years ago.
Inspired by his viewing of Project Runway and Make Me a Supermodel — I would say “brain-deadened” by them, but I’ve barely seen any reality TV, so upholding the finest traditions of criticism, I’ll silently pretend I know what I’m talking about – arts editor Jeff Weinstein (who blogs for Artsjournal as Out There) has a delightful programming suggestion for PBS — or as he calls it, “the gouty network.”
Because Jeff has to explain how the would-be supermodels’ visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (”I’ve never been here before!”) prompted his sudden moment of genius, I’ll cut to the pitch:
Scour the nation for 10 fresh, aspiring, small-town talents who have dreamed about the glamour, recognition, wealth, and lobster-filled summer junkets that make a career as a famous art critic the most gratifying goal anyone might imagine. Set them up in underheated apartments at least two bus and/or subway connections from New York’s Chelsea, epicenter of the international art world.
Provide meals for five days a week and see if they can cadge the rest at openings or parties.
