This week, Art&Seek’s Stephen Becker and Dallas Morning News movie critic Chris Vognar review Baz Luhrmann’s highly-anticipated adaptation of The Great Gatsby. And we talk about Leonardo DiCaprio’s career so far and try to figure out why he’s got so many detractors. Be sure to subscribe to The Big Screen podcast on iTunes. Stream this week’s podcast below or download it.

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For a shortened version of our Great Gatsby review:

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Afternoon Delight is a daily diversion for when you’re just back from lunch, but not quite ready to get down to work. Check back weekdays at 1 p.m. for another one.

If you can find a more adorable video than Jimmy Fallon and John Krasinski competing in a lip-synching competition, the floor is yours.

Congratulations to Guy Reynolds of Dallas, the winner of the Flickr Photo of the Week contest! Guy’s a regular contributor to our contest, which he last won in October. He follows last week’s winner, Jen Wang.

If you would like to participate in the Flickr Photo of the Week contest, all you need to do is upload your photo to our Flickr group page. It’s fine to submit a photo you took earlier than the current week, but we are hoping that the contest will inspire you to go out and shoot something fantastic this week to share with Art&Seek users. If the picture you take involves a facet of the arts, even better. The contest week will run from Monday to Sunday, and the Art&Seek staff will pick a winner on Monday afternoon. We’ll notify the winner through FlickrMail (so be sure to check those inboxes) and ask you to fill out a short survey to tell us a little more about yourself and the photo you took. We’ll post the winners’ photo on Wednesday.

Now, here’s more from Guy:

Title of photo: Dallas Skyline
Equipment used: I used a dSLR with a modified body cap to make pinhole images.
Tell us more about your photo: This was shot while driving on I-45 headed north towards US 75 just after merging from I-30.  It’s a three-second exposure right about dusk.

MOUNTED is the name, taxidermy’s the theme, and Life in Deep Ellum will be the venue for Art Conspiracy‘s annual seed event on June 8.

More than 40 artists are contributing work. Art Con gives them a mounting shield (the wood board taxidermy is attached to) and they take it from there. This year’s crop of contributors are primarily 3-D artists, so expect everything from ceramics to paper sculpture, says Meagan Dahl, Art Con spokeswoman.  Several Makerspace artists are planning digital/techno works as well.

All will be auctioned off at the party. And it will be a party. Life in Deep Ellum becomes a lodge fit for displaying all these trophies.  There will be music – The Days, Bethan, and headliners Calhoun will perform. Food trucks – Nammi and Coolhaus – will be on hand, specialty cocktails will be poured,  and MoKaH Coffee Shop will keep you caffeinated.

The event raises seed money to make Art Conspiracy’s main fund-raiser possible,  later in the year.  ArtCon is an all volunteer, artist-run group that has raised more than $200,000 for small local arts-related non profits. Last year’s beneficiaries were Girls Rock Dallas and W.T. White Academy of Visual and Performing Arts. This year’s beneficiaries will be announced at MOUNTED.

Biggs&Collings: Suspicious Utopias at Texas Christian University.

The Art Galleries at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth recently opened a show of the intellectually charged work of a British artist couple who create art together.  Reporter Joan Davidow says the exhibition Biggs and Collings:  Suspicious Utopias gives us clues about how this British pair works together ….

• Biggs & Collings:  Suspicious Utopias runs through May 11 at The Art Galleries at TCU.

He paints.  She points.  She draws.  He uses the brush.  She selects the colors.  He paints in striated lines.  Emma Biggs and Matthew Collings paint together and they’re married.

They began creating paintings together 15 years ago.  But both have maintained distinctly separate and different art careers.  They both have international reputations.  She is a refined mosaics artist creating works for heads of state.  He, a biting art critic whose contemporary art history book, This Is Modern Art presents a smart, sassy look at today’s art and the absurdity and seriousness of the art world.

But together, Emma Biggs and Matthew Collings create elegant geometric abstractions in subtle, jewel-like colors that radiate from the surface.  Within parallel columns, rows of quadrilateral shapes create sparkling bands of color.  Because he paints pin stripes, the paintings resemble swatches of moire taffeta.  In columns bathed in grey, the colors bounce back and forth, in and out.  Because she knows the dynamics of color and what happens when forms butt against each other, something delightful happens.

TCU gallery director Cristina Rees has studied Matthew Collings’ feisty criticism since the late 1990s. Rees was intrigued knowing he made art and that he did so with his partner. So she invited the pair and presents their paintings on two walls in the gallery.

Opposite the paintings appears a huge, handsomely laid-out text critique of Collings’ work by Merlin Carpenter, mercilessly slashed and edited by Collings as his rebuttal.  The art, the critique and rebuttal all reward and serve as teaching tools in the university setting.  Rees says “The text which cross-references with the paintings is incredibly key.  It teaches one how to look at the paintings.”

The Biggs-Collings geometric abstraction emulates a less practiced art movement of the mid 70s known as Pattern and Decoration, or P&D.  Artists, such as Philip Taaffe and Robert Kushner, adhered to design and ornamentation.

What interests me is that the predominantly solitary nature of artmaking becomes a dual effort.  Other British artist couples come to mind, such as Gilbert & George’s large-scale photographic images, and the Chapman brothers’ figurative sculptures.

Three area arts venues presented Collings’ lectures, which showed a rare community approach to art education:  He talked at Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and The Modern in Fort Worth, and the couple together spoke casually with artists at the TCU gallery.

It’s expensive for a university gallery to bring in talent from abroad. But it expands our horizons as a viewing and learning audience.  Committed to showing international artists, TCU will open in the fall with two Berlin-based filmmakers.

As for Biggs-Collings work, one colleague found the paintings too decorative and repetitive; the large-scale, expanded text merely a museum label; and the multiple talks overdone.  In contrast, Rees sees their paintings creating controversy for not being shocking and believes the painting and color can be taken seriously.  What pleases me is the communal effort and the unexpected, intellectual, in-your-face approach to art criticism.

Jeffrey Skilling, the man behind one of the biggest fraud cases / corporate bankruptcies in American history — and not coincidentally, the central figure in Enron at Theatre Three — has cut a deal to shorten his 24-year prison sentence, according to the NYTimes. He was convicted of multiple counts of fraud in the collapse of the Texas energy firm in 2001. Yet many of the financial deals Skilling and convicted accountant Andy Fastow pioneered — like bundled debt and derivatives — are now common practice on Wall Street.

As part of the agreement with the Justice Department, the former chief executive of the energy giant will waive his rights to any further appeals. In addition, he has agreed to allow more than $40 million of assets that were seized from him to be distributed to victims of Enron’s failure.

Employees lost their retirement savings and shareholders lost billions of dollars after the once highflying company slid into bankruptcy in 2001.

Enron runs at Theatre Three through May 25.

CLIBURN CHANGEUP: South Korean pianist Hyung-Min Suh and American pianist YouYou Zhang have decided not to compete in this year’s Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. They’ll now be receiving Christmas cards from Yekwon Sunwoo of South Korea and Nikita Abrosimov of Russia, who will fill their slots. You can learn more about the new competitors, who are each 24, over at theaterjones.com.

DMA’S POP-UP ART SPOT: Since the DMA went free back in January, the museum has introduced all sorts of new programs to entertain the expanded crowds. One of the new features is the Pop-Up Art Spot, which allows visitors to create art in a different gallery each week. This week, the Art Spot is parked in the 20th-Century European Art Gallery on Level 2. That’s where you can take part in a speed-sketching game or write a poem using words from artists in the collection. More details are on the museum’s Uncrated Blog.

SCREEN WRITING: This year’s Lone Star Film Festival is still a good six months away. But the Lone Star Film Society staff has been keeping busy by writing a lot about the movies these days. And there are a slew of recent posts worth checking out, including a history of coming-of-age films tied to the upcoming Kings of Summer, a look at this year’s book-to-film adaptations and a check-in with David Lowery ahead of his trip to the Cannes Film Festival with Ain’t Them Bodies Saints.

Afternoon Delight is a daily diversion for when you’re just back from lunch, but not quite ready to get down to work. Check back weekdays at 1 p.m. for another one.
Ray Harryhausen, the master of stop-motion movie monsters, died at 92. Cyclops, sword-fighting skeletons and the Kraken himself — Harryhausen created them all, and here they are in chronological order.

The opening will be November 27th this year. It comes in a press release about future exhibitions, most of which we already knew — Lords of the Ancient Andes, The Age of Picasso and Matisse — but one we didn’t:  A show of selections of samurai armor from the Ann and Gabriel Barbier-Mueller Collection in Dallas. That collection is basically just up the street from KERA, as we learned from Glasstire.

The selections are there, that is , when they’re not, as they currently are, on display in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, making their official US debut.

In fact, according to the release, the Dallas samurai will be the first major exhibition in the Kimbell to open (Feb. 16, 2014) in the Renzo Piano-designed expansion, after it opens in November.

The full release:

Read More »

Vintage convertibles delivered nominees to the Music Hall at Fair Park. Photo: Courtney Collins

There’s no business like show business; just ask the hundreds of high school theater students who packed the Music Hall at Fair Park Tuesday night. These kids were nominated for DSM High School Musical Theatre Awards and were given the full star treatment.

Vintage convertibles delivered the nominees to the Music Hall. They stopped for interviews, walked the red carpet and posed for photos, all before the awards ceremony even got underway.

These actors may only be in high school, but Aledo’s Riley Morrison already has the award -show- pleasantries down pat.

“It’s an honor just to be nominated win or lose, it’s amazing that everybody came together and pulled this together,” Riley says “It’s amazing.”

Best Actress Dakota Ratliff and Best Actor Cameron Wenrich in the green room. Photo: Courtney Collins

Riley was a best actor nominee for playing Seymour in Little Shop of Horrors.

“Believe it or not I connected with a little bit of the shyness of Seymour. It’s something that I think we all have inside of us is we’re all a little bit shy when we’re with a very beautiful girl,” Riley says.

But it was Plano Senior High School’s charming Cameron Wenrich who took home the Best Actor hardware as Frank in Curtains. He says he wasn’t expecting the win.

“After I got over the stupification, it was one of the most exhilarating feelings in the world and I wouldn’t ask for anything better,” says Cameron.

Mercedes Arndt, a nominee for best supporting actress, interviewed on the red carpet.

On the girl’s side of the competition, a 4’9’’ dynamo named Dakota Ratliff from Ryan High School in Denton won best actress for Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors.

“It was my first musical that I saw when I was a little girl and I know it sounds cheesy but that’s kind of what started this all and we’d been begging to do this show,” Dakota says.

While snagging the trophy was definitely a highlight of Tuesday’s show, it was obvious those in attendance weren’t just there for the win; it was all about the love of the game.

Plano Senior High School’s production of Curtains also took home the Best Musical award. Cameron and Dakota as Best Actor and Actress will travel to New York this summer to compete for a National High School Musical Theatre Award.

Full List of Winners:

Best Featured Performer: Natalie Pasquinelli in High School Musical at Hockaday School/St. Mark’s School of Texas

Best Scenic Design: Plano West High School for Sweeney Todd

Best Lighting Design: Denton High School for A Christmas Carol

Best Costume Design: McKinney North High School for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

Best All Student Orchestra: Berkner High School for Bye Bye Birdie

Best Ensemble/Chorus: McKinney North High School for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

Best Crew and Technical Execution: Plano Senior High School for Curtains

Best Choreography/Musical Staging: Newman Smith High School for How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

Best Musical Direction: Waxahachie High School for Kiss Me, Kate

Best Direction: Waxahachie High School for Kiss Me, Kate

Best Supporting Actor: Baxter Pitt in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at McKinney North High School

Best Supporting Actress: Kaitlynn Loper in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at McKinney North High School

Best Leading Actor: Cameron Wenrich as Frank Cioffi in Curtains at Plano Senior High School

Best Leading Actress: Dakota Ratliff as Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors at Ryan High School

Best Musical: Plano Senior High School- Curtains