Reading coverage of the Dallas Art Fair this week, I was pleased to see that the old saying remains true. “New York writers writing about Dallas absolutely cannot stop themselves from using the single most trite cliché about Texas.” So they say the saying goes.
Here’s the opening—the lead, or lede, in the biz—of the Dallas Art Fair report from Artsy.net:
Is everything bigger in Texas?
And here’s the lead from Forbes, in a piece about art riffing on the American flag at the Dallas Art Fair:
They say that everything is bigger in Texas, and that also includes pride for the United States of America.
Fair enough. How else are out-of-state readers going to understand that they are reading about something in the state of Texas, where things are big?
Not sure how the Dallas Morning News excuses this lead in Chris Vognar’s otherwise compelling review of new books from Lawrence Wright and Don Graham:
Everything’s bigger in Texas, the saying goes, and that includes the state’s capacity for self-regard.
An essay on the myth of Texan exceptionalism, mercifully not shortened here to “Texceptionalism,” deserves a bigger cliché.
