Art&Seek should really point a video camera at Jerome Weeks more often and just let him go off about Dallas art, history, and civic development. In January, Heritage Magazine invited Weeks to take part in their Tuesdays at Slocum series of conversations, and now some video excerpts from that lecture are available online. Some of Weeks’ interesting observations: arts organizations in Dallas operating on shifting sand since the city experiences continual resident turnover, subscribers moving out of town as suddenly as they move in. Weeks also spoke about the Dallas Theater Center’s history, how for so many years its policy of not hiring equity actors left it out of the loop – “isolated on the prarrie,” as Weeks puts it. The Arts District, he adds, is “never going to be a real urban neighborhood:”
How many millionaire condos can there be; how many millionaires can live there and is that going to be a real urban neighborhood?
That’s not just a valid point – it is probably the only point on the matter.
But Weeks isn’t all Eeyore glumness. Dallas has a lot going for it precisely because it gains life from the influx of new residents from small towns and other cities. Running through a list of famous artists, Weeks points out that the world’s great cultural centers were charged by non-natives, and Dallas has plenty of non-natives. The question, though, is why would the next Picasso or Van Gogh end up in Dallas when other American urban centers feel a lot more like 19th century Paris?