Guest blogger Lisa Taylor owns Taylor-Made Press, which represents The Texas Voices. If you are an artist, arts professional or arts educator and would like to post a guest blog, let us know at artandseek@kera.org.

For the almost 20 years I’ve been working in the arts, I’ve always wondered about why more collaborations don’t happen. From what I’ve seen when collaborations DO happen, it’s good for all concerned. Recently I spoke to Sandra Conrad of the professional chamber chorus The Texas Voices about the group’s collaborative efforts.

Sandra likes collaboration because it means more people celebrating choral music in the long run. “It gives us a chance to work together, which adds excitement to the art.”

“There’s the perception that you’re stealing some one else’s audience,” Sandra said about why folks don’t collaborate frequently, “but we need to, we need to support each other.”

“If one group or person is successful, then everyone else is successful, especially where choral music is concerned, because our venues seldom seat more then 500 people, so there are plenty of audience members to go around!”

In its five year history, The Texas Voices has collaborated with the Celtic folk group called Vagabond, organists and Plano Civic Chorus. It also collaborates with local composers, such as The Texas Voice’s resident composer Debra Scroggins.

This Friday at The Texas Voices’ concert at Zion Lutheran Church, Texas Woman’s University’s Director of Choral Activities Dr. Joni Jensen will guest conduct and be a guest soloist. I look forward to the collaboration!

THE BALLOTS ARE IN: The DFW Film Critics Association picked Slumdog Millionaire, the story of two brothers fighting their way out of the Mumbai slums, as its best film of 2008. The next films on the group’s Top 10 list for 2008 are Milk, The Dark Knight, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Wrestler, The Visitor, Frost/Nixon, Doubt, Wall*E and Happy-Go-Lucky.

Sean Penn (Milk) and Anne Hathaway (Rachael Getting Married) took home the top acting awards while Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight) and Viola Davis (Doubt) earned the supporting awards.

Man on Wire was named best documentary; Wall*E took home the best animated film prize.

I can’t say I have much of a problem with how the voting turned out — mostly because it mirrors pretty closely my ballot. Of the top 10 films, eight of them also made my list. Missing from mine were The Visitor (which I liked, just not Top-10 liked) and Happy-Go-Lucky, which I just about despised. I realize that I am in the minority on that one as the film has made several Top 10 lists this year. I, on the other hand, found it just annoying. In the acting categories, I, too, named the winning actors, though I picked Meryl Streep (Doubt) and Penelope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) in the actress awards.

I’ll be posting my personal top-10 list later in the month, and as I catch up on a few more films, something might get bumped from my current list. But for now, I’d say my DFWFCA colleagues pretty much hit the nail on the head (Happy-Go-Lucky, not withstanding). The full list of winners should be updated today on dfwfilmcritics.com.

A MUSEUM MERGER: Seeking to help out the cash-strapped Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art proposed a merger of the two institutions on Tuesday. That got me to thinking – in the end, is a museum merger better or worse for art viewers? On one hand, the museumgoer could potentially see the best from two powerhouse collections in one trip. On the other, some of each museum’s permanent collection would surely spend a lot of time in storage. Obviously, any time an arts institution goes under, it has a negative impact on the art world. But for casual museumgoers, is there a chance that their viewing experience gets better in seeing the best from two collections in one trip? I’m just thinking out loud on this one…

COMINGS AND GOINGS: File this just on the outside edge of the arts world. Ed Bark, purveyor of unclebarky.com and the former longtime television critic of The Dallas Morning News, has posted a handy list of departures from North Texas newscasts. If you’ve been wondering whatever happened to old so-and-so, check to see if their name is on Ed’s list.

Congratulations to Ric Martin, the winner of our Flickr Photo of the Week contest! If you like Ric’s photo, he has a whole series of traffic photos on his Flickr page. He follows last week’s winner, Tim Pittsinger.

If you would like to participate, all you need to do is upload your photo to to our Flickr group page. It’s fine to submit a photo you took previous to 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 another 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, more from Ric:

Ric Martin

Title: Josey Lane 4

Equipment: Nikon D300 with a 50mm 1.4

Tell us more about your photo: Rush hour traffic is a drag, so I’ve been mounting the camera in my car with views out the front, rear and side windows to record the movement of the traffic at night. This pic captures 25-odd seconds of traffic and the lights along the road on Josey Lane in Carrollton.

Guest blogger Brad Ford Smith is a Dallas artist and arts conservationist.

If you are an artist in search of a new medium to explore, here is a list I created while walking the rows and rows of galleries at Art Basel 2008. This is a list of materials and techniques that have been used by so many artists in so many ways that they can officially be called Been Done.

*Painting over, or altering old Victorian photographs. Yes, our ancestors do look funny and strange with the addition of rabbit ears and pig snouts.

*Using covers from old hard bound books as canvas. This instant access to a lush surface has now left thousands of books out there running around naked, cold and unloved.

*Sculptures made from phone books. Phone books may seem like a good resource, because there are just so many of them lying around the house. And that’s the problem — they are lying around everyone’s house.

*Presenting photos of your drunken friends as a window into a counterculture. These are just photos of your drunken friends that you took while you were drunk, so post them on Myspace where they belong.

* Adopting the style of a famous artist: If you copy the style of another artists, and you call it an “Ode to…” (as in “Ode to Yves Klein,” pictured), it does not change the fact that it is still a copy.

*Drawing cartoons with a wood burning tool. Pyrography is a retro craft that produces a lush line while filling your studio with the sweet aroma of burning wood. If you choose to use a retro craft, push its limits.

*Laser cutting: Just like with retro crafts, it’s not enough to just laser cut a bunch of lace doilies out of steel. You have to use this tool as one of many steps in the process of creating, not as the one and only step.

*Mutant deer heads: The kind with three eyes, five ears and gold metallic skin. Could it be that it’s the toxic materials used in making these deer heads that is mutating the deer heads in the first place.

*Solitary human ears: whether it’s a drawing, a sculpture, or a needlepoint, stop doing them. Find some other body part to obsess on. Perhaps elbows.

*Rhine Stone covered anything. Damien Hirst did the diamond encrusted human skull last year. Any thing less than diamonds is just a cheap imitation, anything more would be a question of why would you?

The one exception to this list of plenty is bunny rabbits. There were lots and lots of bunny rabbits at Art Basel, but bunnies always sell, so, I suppose it is still viable for starving artists to keep cranking them out. Just try to hold back on the amount of visible blood.

Overall, the artwork at Art Basel 2008 was amazing and inspiring. I was very happy to see lots of art on paper, and that cheaper priced flat screen TVs have made a major impact on the quality of video art. In closing, I highly recommend going to art fairs, not only to see trends to avoid, but also as a way to visually validate the artistic direction that you have chosen to pursue.

Critical Mass, the National Book Critics Circle’s blog (as opposed to its organizational website), has been attractively re-designed.

And it has moved here.

THE STATE OF THEATER: The National Endowment for the Arts released a major report Monday on the state of American theaters, just in time for it to be largely irrelevant. The survey of 2,000 theaters compiles data from 1990 to 2005 that “indicates broad growth and generally positive fiscal health” for nonprofit theaters.

That’s likely not the case with many nonprofit theaters these days given the current climate, something the report anticipated in saying that the theaters show “vulnerability during economic downturns.”

There is some data in there that speaks to audience trends. In summary: they like musicals more than plays. In 2005, 37 million people attended musical theater, up from 32 million in 1992. That trend heads the opposite direction for plays, as 21 million people saw one in 2005 – 4 million fewer than 1992.

Despite the upward trend for musicals, many of Broadway’s most successful shows are closing early, according to The New York Times. And producers are having difficulties securing funds for new shows.

You can read more about the NEA report here and here.

AN INTERNET STAR IS BORN: After the requisite daily dose of doom and gloom, how about a little pick-me-up? For those of you who have visited the Art&Seek Flickr page and considered entering our Flickr Photo of the Week contest, I have proof that Flickr can lead to stardom for budding photographers.

Chrissie White is a 15-year-old photographer living in Seattle who receives hundreds of comments on every new image she posts. And deservingly so – her highly conceptualized narrative photos are attention-grabbers. Seattlepi.com picked up on her growing stardom and says that she’s already selling 8X8 inch prints for $40. Who knows – one day you might enjoy bragging to a friend that you picked up “an early Chrissie White” for 40 bucks?

The takeaway here is: keep those photos coming for our weekly contest. Maybe we’ll help make a star out of you, too.

The Charles and Dee Wyly Theater is finally getting its outer skin and is showing its ultimate shape. But unlike the visibly dramatic Winspear Opera House, the true uniqueness of the Wyly is only beginning. It’s mostly on the inside.

Joshua Prince-Ramus was the American partner in Rem Koolhaas’ design firm OMA (Office of Metropolitan Architecture), the man in charge of designing the Wyly Theater — before he split off in 2006 to form his own company, REX. (That’s why the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts officially credits REX/OMA as the architects).

That same year, Prince-Ramus gave one of the TEDTalks in Monterey, California. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) hosts a famous annual conference of Big Brained sorts and posts the videos online as TEDTalks. In his lecture, Prince-Ramus discusses the “hyper-rational” method he used on three projects: the Seattle Public Library, the Wyly Theater and the downtown Museum Plaza in Louisville. His explanations are worth hearing because not only are they strikingly illustrated, they make (some) sense out of what may seem to many a perverse structure.

Seattle Public Library

Prince-Ramus repeatedly argues that the three buildings, as eccentric as they may seem, are not the result of architectural whim or a competition for attention, although he has admitted he’s perfectly willing to risk what many people might find ugly. A process of deep-thinking about the buildings’ basic functions has led to these designs — an approach he learned (and adapted) from Koolhaas. As he told BusinessWeek:

We believe in a hyper-rational process where you accept the constraints, conditions, and challenges of a project, and you attempt to engage them by going back to first principles. You don’t accept any convention. If someone says, “This is how you solve that problem,” you give them the bird. You just say, “I don’t want to hear it.”

Can you give me an example?
A good example is the [Charles and Dee Wyly Theater] in Dallas. The theater consultant kept saying that the fly tower has to be a concrete structure like this and this and this. But we said, “Don’t give us predigested solutions. Tell us what it needs to do, and let us figure out how to build it.” We truly wanted to go back to first principles: What does it mean to create an acoustic enclosure?

Our observation is that if you do this hyper-rational, almost dumb process of taking everything back to first principles, it’s tiring as hell, but you start to construct something that has never been done before — something that transcends convention.

Some people, on the other hand, might argue that a number of those conventions, worked out over thousands of years of theater history, do serve still-useful functions. But Prince-Ramus describes the Dallas Theater Center as “an infamous theater company” (he means that as a compliment) because of its “multi-form” tradition. It’s that desire for flexibility that led him to “put the theater on its head,” design what he calls “a theater machine” and in the process re-define “fly tower,” “acoustic enclosure” and other theater apparatuses: “At the push of a button, it allows the artistic director to move between proscenium, thrust, arena and flat floor.”

One correction to Prince-Ramus: In passing, he mentions that the highly adaptable nature of the Wyly will permit the Theater Center to stage its inaugural play, a drama about Charles Lindbergh that will use real aircraft. Not so, says DTC managing director Mark Hadley. In fact, he has never heard of such a proposal — and he goes all the way back to former artistic director Richard Hamburger’s ideas to adapt Edna Ferber’s novel Giant as the Wyly’s debut. (That idea fell through, Hadley reports, because someone else was already adapting it.) The actual choice for the premiere will be announced in a few months, Hadley says. (Another small correction: When Prince-Ramus says things like “Wagnerian procession” late in his explanation, it’s clear he means “proscenium.”)

The YouTube video excerpt above begins after Prince-Ramus’ discussion of the Seattle library at the moment he starts talking about the Wyly. If you wish to see the whole clip, you can go here. Thanks to Art&Seek poster hd for the original link.

Have you already hit The Nutcracker and A Christmas Carol this year? If not, you should. But if you have, there’s still exceptional holiday fare out there to take in, led by Lone Star Circus’ Le Cirque.

Le Cirque celebrates the season with an international collection of acrobats, aerialists, hand balancers (including Svetlana Gololobova, above), jugglers, clowns and the best students of Lone Star Circus School.

And Art&Seek has got you covered.

We’re giving away 25 sets of four tickets each here on our blog. The show runs from Dec. 27-31, and we’ve got tickets to shows on Dec. 28, 29 and 30 at 7:30 p.m. and Dec. 31 at 5:30 p.m. All you have to do is send me an e-mail (sbecker@kera.org) with “circus” in the subject line and your name and the top two dates that you would prefer in the body. I’ll write you back letting you know which show you are down for and we’ll put you on the will call list.

Easy enough, right?

If you would like to purchase tickets, that can be done by calling 214.740.0051 or online at www.dct.org or www.lonestarcircus.org.

UPDATE: As of Wednesday at 4 p.m., I only have tickets left for the Dec. 31 show at 5:30 p.m. If you would like to go to that show, feel free to e-mail me.

UPDATE II: All the tickets are gone. Thanks to all who participated, and we hope you enjoy the show.

Maybe you think the Artistic Director of an established theater company should spend her chilly downtime discovering dusty German plays from the 1920s and quoting Ionesco to fellow Master Thespians. That’s how I always envisioned things, until I saw this.

Amphibian Productions’ Kathleen Anderson Culebro wrote an autobiographical (?!) short about her Life In The Arts – it’s kind of like This is Spinal Tap for the Fort Worth theater scene. Kathleen says it’s “the first installment of a series of webisodes we produced to encourage people to support the arts.” A noble mission indeed, but does Lorne Michaels know about this?

You can watch “For the Love” above or in high resolution on Amphibian’s Web site.

If you’ve got a fan of the musicals on your shopping list you are really, really trying to impress, Dallas Summer Musicals has got you covered. DSM has put up on eBay its Dallas Summer Musicals Christmas Tree. Should you be the top bidder, you’ll receive:

A white Christmas tree covered with special DSM and Broadway musical ornaments

Two orchestra level season tickets to opening night of Dallas Summer Musicals 2009 Music Hall Series:

(2) Tickets to Happy Days opening night, May 26, 2009
(2) Tickets to The Wizard of Oz opening night, June 9, 2009
(2) Tickets to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang opening night, June 23, 2009
(2) Tickets to A Chorus Line opening night, July 7, 2009
(2) Tickets to Legally Blonde opening night, July 21, 2009
(2) Tickets to Mamma Mia! opening night, August 18, 2009
(2) Tickets to Mary Poppins opening night, September 24, 2009

-An invitation for two to every opening night cast party of the season shows, listed above.

-Dinner for two prior to each opening night at the newly renovated “Dining at the Music Hall” gourmet restaurant.

So far, the top bid sits at $735. I’d say that’s a steal considering all that you get in this package (which the DSM values at $1,500). Of course, bidding is open until Dec. 19, so there’s plenty of time to get that price driven up. But whoever wraps this baby up is probably going to be in the good graces of the receiver for a long time.