A curator from New York recently asked me if we have any museums down here? Friends visiting for the first time from Boston seemed disappointed that I did not pick them up in a stagecoach from the airport and take them to a ranch, and they discover that Dallas is “just another big city.” Although I had explained this to them on many prior occasions, they had to see it to believe it.

Living in the city and trying to eat conscientiously, buying organic and locally grown, trying to avoid preservatives etc., means spending a good deal of time locating food and little time thinking about how it reaches us. At home on the farm where she grew up, Teresa Burkett rediscovers that eating fresh is simpler—a fabric of the rural lifestyle.

In this imploding economy, ironically triggered by houses, I am sure someone in the country has offered that inexpensive house shows are an economically driven phenomenon. But house shows are not the effect of a starved financial economy – rather a starved musical economy.

Do we talk about the aesthetic material qualities of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain or the revolutionary ways in which it commented on contemporary art and our interpretation of it?

Historically, productive members of society ask very little at the end of the hard work day: a cold beer, good conversation, and a little romance if they’re lucky. Why is it, then, that the musical community had drifted so far away from the working man’s pace?

Art Review
Polly Lanning Sparrow and Leslie Wilkes at the Barry Whistler Gallery