The following originally appeared as a comment to the article “Dallas Waits for Her Sage”. We are reposting it here with the permission of the author.

Okay, I really do want to be nice. So please don’t mistake for mean spiritedness my advocacy for a certain standard of objectivity and journalistic integrity from your wonderful endeavor. I’m very happy that you have launched a site devoted to writing intelligently about culture in Dallas. You may very well become the voice that’s been missing literally for years now.

But that voice must be discerning, intelligent and objective, not just poetic, imaginative and colorful. I’m concerned because I’ve now read two articles here that seem effusive and self-congratulatory regarding the cultural viability of Dallas. I will celebrate along with you the truly vital signs, the Nasher for just one example, but some of the transformation touted here may end up being the result of what Dallas is already good at: dressing up and looking good. Could it be you’re getting all excited about the structure, the housing for culture (some of that not even built yet) rather than culture itself? Like the false front facades in Dry Gulch, it’s pretty embarrassing when you get caught buying into your own PR.

The two Renegade Bus articles I refer to are Ms. Simek’s “Incremental Growth: A Vision for This Site,” but more to my point, this one, Ms. Arbery’s “Dallas Waits for Her Sage.” Excuse me for saying so, but to me it comes off reading less like cultural commentary and more like a chamber-of-commerce marketing piece. That’s quite a leap, from our red yucca, or even from our burgeoning arts district, all the way to a cultural metamorphoses like that of Dublin or Paris.

I realize such boosterism is easy to get sucked into when we see signs of great promise. For instance, two years ago, the Dallas Art Dealers Association organized an event around a panel of local arts writers and museum representatives. The forum’s title unabashedly asked if, in terms of culture, we might not be the next New York City (I still wince whenever I remember it). But my point is, they too wanted to glory in the rich cultural life Dallas appeared to be developing, but so much so, they weren’t willing to also acknowledge and deal with those niggling little obstacles still in the way.

Like the Bus pieces I’ve mentioned, on that day the smoking of one’s own dope was most evident in a lack of objectivity. In his introduction, the panel moderator justified how they might even dare use that phrase, “the next New York City,” by citing an article I’ll call What Makes Great Cities for Art, and close to the top on that list of key ingredients was a thriving community of working artists.

We don’t have one of those here (community being more than just a population), but that panel of people who wrote about art and who curated art didn’t know that. They apparently assumed that since Dallas is a Big City with an Arts District, and one seemingly on its way to becoming a Great City for Art, it must certainly have most of those key ingredients in place.

But being myself part of Dallas’ not so thriving artistic community and wondering if I was living in an alternate universe, during the Q&A I asked the Dallas Museum of Art representative what our flagship visual art institution was doing to help nurture such a community, because whatever it was I wanted to be a part of it.

After huddling Family Feud-style, their answer was their Free Thursday evenings, which of course is a benefit to the general population or anyone else finding themselves in Dallas that night, but definitely not an outreach to the artistic community. And my complaint now isn’t what they were or weren’t offering to artists, but their lack of objectivity and resulting cluelessness about what is actually going on here. Caught up in this contagious vision of rich cultural life in Dallas, they just couldn’t get real.

My too long-winded point is this: Of course I’m happy Dallas appears to be developing an actual big-city cultural life, and who knows, maybe even a “story.” But we’re still missing some very important ingredients, subject for a series of articles all its own, and we don’t help Dallas “arrive” by patting ourselves on the back so much. Renegade Bus seems to me to be in a unique position to help facilitate that very process, but with critical observation rather than cheerleading.

I’d like to see Dallas actually get a little further building out and populating its “giant transformation ” before we worry about who will immortalize it.

James Michael Starr is an assemblage and collage artist whose work has appeared in galleries and exhibitions in both his native U.S. and abroad. He was selected for inclusion in four consecutive Critic’s Choice exhibitions at the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art and included by invitation in the 2001 International Exhibition of Contemporary Collage in Paris, France, as well as in Assemblage 100, which toured New Zealand in 2004. Images of his art have been selected for reproduction in several books, including the 2006 French survey of contemporary collage, “L’art du Collage a L’aube du Vingt et Unieme Siecle (The Art of Collage at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century).” He is represented in Dallas by Conduit Gallery.