1. The New York Times reviews Renzo Piano’s plans for a new wing of the Kimbell museum, which will be officially unveiled today:

It’s true that Mr. Piano’s design is not as transcendent a work of architecture as the original Kimbell. Nor does it quite live up to his own masterpiece, the 1987 Menil Collection building in Houston. But Mr. Piano has managed to find that magical and elusive balance between respecting a great work and adhering to one’s own aesthetic convictions.

2. Scott Cantrell reports on the extension in the Dallas Morning News, quoting Piano:

“It’s one of the best buildings in the world,” Piano says of the Kimbell, “and the very best building by Kahn. We’re just completing things that are missing.”

3. Jerome Weeks has story for KERA this morning, noting that the Kimbell expansion will be the third of Piano’s museum projects in Texas, adding to the Nasher Sculpture Center and the Menil Collection. Traces of those museums, Weeks says, can be found in the new Kimbell building, as well as references to Kahn, for whom Piano worked early in his career.

To anyone familiar with Piano’s other museums, the facade and the general floorplan of the Kimbell annex recall both Piano’s Nasher and Menil designs. The architect says the inspiration of Kahn’s original building runs through all of his Texas museums. The airy galleries, the sense of scale, the use of concrete and natural sunlight.

4. And on the Chicago Tribune‘s architecture blog, Blair Kamin writes that:

It is impossible to judge the plan from afar, but it seems to have one big plus: It will bring museum patrons into what Kahn always intended to be the main entrance for his building. (Currently, visitors typically park to the east of the Kimbell and enter through what is actually its back entrance.) Architecturally, the design’s success may well hinge on Piano’s ability to endow his aboveground pavilion with what he calls “robust walls of concrete.” The drawings provided in a press kit do not indicate how he plans to do that.

You can browse through images of the new building plans on the Kimbell’s website.

(Image courtesy of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop)

If you flipped on the Krys Boyd Show during the 1 o’clock hour, you would have heard Sam Wainwright Douglas speaking about his film, Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio, which screens tonight at the Magnolia as part of the Dallas Center for Architecture’s fantastic architecture in film series. Towards the end of the interview, Douglas spoke about the current state of Texas filmmaking. While we have been enjoying a recent bounty of new productions originating shooting in the Dallas area, Texas as a whole, Douglas says, is loosing out business to Louisiana and New Mexico. He mentioned a West Texas production that paid its cast and crew in two dollar bills in order to measure the impact on the local economy (news of which Google couldn’t help me find). The conversation is also excuse enough to plug a second one-time local screening occurring this week. Tomorrow Clay Liford’s Earthling, a rather smart, well-realized sci-fi goo-fest, screens tomorrow at the Fort Worth Modern. Earthling screened at the Dallas IFF, and those who care what I thought about it can click here.

In the world according to Michael Patrick King—and his newest film Sex and the City 2 specifically—all is well. The recession has managed to touch everyone in Manhattan except for Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte. These madcap 40-somethings continue to dress in couture fit for teenagers. But make no mistake–even in Manhattan there are losers. In the spirit of New York Magazine’s “Real Housewives of New York City” recaps, let’s name the losers in this movie.

You can’t talk about Avenue Q without talking about Sesame Street because they’re both talking about the same things – albeit on different ends of the educational continuum. Big Bird, Grover and the gang were created to help teach kids the things they needed to get ready for pre-school. Avenue Q picks up right after college, teaching the things they need to get ready for life. Both use humans and puppets in an urban environment confronting mysteries big and small ..read more

1. Theater composer Scott Warrender is prepping his latest Dallas world premiere, “Blankity-Black,” writes Lawson Taitte. Warrender has had success in Dallas before with his plays Das Barbecu and Cinderella. But one local actor says: “I really don’t think Scott knows how good he is.”

2. Rest in peace Kristina Baker. The British-born actress, who featured in many local performances, including works at the WaterTower Theater, Circle Theatre, Classical Acting Company, and others, died of bladder cancer Monday. Theater Jones has the obituary.

3. I’ll admit, my imagination has not been able to resist getting swept up in the latest series of high level art thefts. In another life – another moral universe – I see myself on a Vespa in Monte Carlo, in between games of Baccarat, meeting in cafés with Russian oligarchs interested in shelling out suitcases of cash for Picassos I pilfered off the walls of a Paris museum. But along comes the Wall Street Journal with this sobering story:

But in the real world, it’s a much less charming affair. Art crooks don’t wear black jumpsuits; they don’t stage elaborate robberies. In fact, most museum crooks are second-rate thugs that steal art because it packs so much value into such a compact and portable package.

Well then, my mind will have to wander to diamond theft.

One of the consequences of the waning influence of the church at the turn of the last century was that something was bound to take its place. At the same time, modern artists were beginning to shed any recognizable remnants of their particular cultural histories to construct a new future that aimed to be universal and thus poised for wide appeal. Kasemir Malevich turned icon paintings into spare abstractions. Marcus Rothkowitz even shed the offending ethnicity of his name, along ..read more

Did you notice there are no film festivals going on in Dallas right now? Sad times. But good news dropped in the inbox this morning: the Asian Film Festival, which kicks off on July 23, has announced the first four of 40 scheduled films. These include, from Hong Kong, Wilson Yip’s IP Man 2 and Jing Wong’s I Corrupt All Cops; from the United States, Arvin Chen’s Au Revoir Taipei; and from Japan, Noboru Iguchi’s Robogeisha (yes, awesomely enough, it ..read more

In a piece in Sunday’s Dallas Morning News, Michael Granberry followed up on his report on the lawsuit filed by Dallas art collector Marguerite Hoffman over the recent Sotheby’s sale of a work of art by Mark Rothko that she had sold in 2007 to a Mexican investor. In the second piece, Granberry poses a number of questions that the recent incident raises about the donation made to the Dallas Museum of Art in 2005 by three prominent Dallas families ..read more

1. They’re digging through the historical archives again at the Dallas Observer, this time Jim Schutze unearths a documentary film that will surely spoil your morning’s productivity (much like how the insane amount of interest in that In-and-Out Burger news crashed D’s servers yesterday, spoiling ours.). The 1961 film is called “Dallas at the Crossroads,” and it is about this city’s school desegregation fight.

2. Dallas Art News shares a press release for a Heritage Auction Gallery event that will delight readers who a) love photography, and b) have deep pockets. On June 9, the Dallas-based auction house will be offering works by Robert Mapplethorpe, Irving Penn, Timothy O’Sullivan, Helmut Newton, Garry Winogrand, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Yousuf Karsh, and Annie Leibovitz.

3. On Art Fag City, Paddy Johnson recounts sections of a recent piece by Anton Vidokle in e-flux journal #16 that asks the question: have curators overtaken the importance of artists, or, are curators the new artists? I think this excerpt gets to the heart of the issue:

It has recently been pointed out to me that as artistic production becomes increasingly deskilled—and, by extension, less identifiable by publics as art when placed outside the exhibition environment—exhibitions themselves become the singular context through which art can be made visible as art. This alone makes it easy to understand why so many now think that inclusion in an exhibition produces art, rather than artists themselves.

Vidokle goes on to say he believes that position is bollocks, as they say over the pond, but you’ll have to click on to read more.

For a minute Sunday afternoon, after arriving at Bass Performance Hall for the second performance of Fort Worth Opera’s spring opera festival, I thought I had accidentally wandered into a revival of The Music Man. On the stage, instead of the generic European village every opera connoisseur knows to expect for Donizetti’s Elixir of Love, I saw pure Americana, in the form of sets inspired by and suggesting Grant Wood’s neatly plowed fields, gently curving roads, and good-hearted rural citizens. ..read more