The robots have been running FrontRow for the past week or so, and this is our first day back. So let’s look back at some of the arts and culture chit-chat that transpired over the past week:
Amidst the glut of year-end retrospectives, KERA has been running a series looking ahead to 2013, including in-depth looks at Lyic Stage’s upcoming production of a “lost” Broadway musical, the Dallas Museum of Art’s new conservation studio, the Kimbell’s Renzo Piano-designed expansion, and the years-in-the-making Stark Club documentary by Dallas International Film Festival co-founder Michael Cain.
The Dallas Morning News has its own rundown of the anticipated highlights of 2013, which include other openings and renovations, like the George Bush Presidential Center and Big Tex. Theater critic Lawson Taitte is looking forward to the Dallas Theater Center’s big musicals, and movie critic Chris Vognar is excited to see what the Oak Cliff Film Festival has in store for their sophomore outing.
Over on Theater Jones, Lauren Smart has a mostly agreeable “wish list” for 2013. She wants more roles for minorities and women, a gripe our theater scribes have grinded on. She also wants more theater artists to think of Dallas as a feasible home base for art-making and points to the model of Austin-based troupe Rude Mechanicals as a guide.
Also on Theater Jones, a tribute to Jeff Kinman, the frequent Uptown Player who passed away in 2012 after years of battling HIV. In addition to celebration Kinman’s life and contributions to Dallas culture, it is worthwhile remembering that despite advances in treatments over the decades, the war on AIDS is still not won.
Switching over to the world of visual art, Janet Tyson believes 2013 is going to be the year of Ken Price. Writing on Glasstire, she focuses on the catalogue that accompanies the upcoming exhibition of the artist’s work at the Nasher Sculpture Center, which debuted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and will finish its tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Also on Glasstire, just before the break, Lucia Simek squeaked in this interview with Eva Rothschild, whose Nasher installation closes later this month. Here’s a taste:
The objects are inert. The objects have no feeling, but obviously we bring this way of looking to them. It’s how we look at art; it’s how we look at religious objects, the devotional object. How the object becomes kind of deified and the object has no stake in that itself—that’s absolutely our collection of human emotions and objections and perceptions, but the object itself is inert. Obviously as an artist, you’re working somehow to explain this object that holds all of these things. But it doesn’t materially change the object. The object is the object.
Image at top: A rendering of the new Kimbell expansion
