Modern Art in Dallas Fort Worth

The Artist visited MOMA at Dallas Fort Worth recently. Designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando, the building is a triumph of high minded modernity, Part Neo Stalinist concrete bunker, part green-house water feature. This unlikely melange of austere modernist vision creates a restful and strangely calming space. The museum contains a number of important works by such artists as Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and Hockney. Particular highlights include a stunning example of Twenty-Five Colored Marylins (1962) by Warhol and a 1938 painting entitled Masqued Image by Jackson Pollock, a painting that for me reveals a missing-link connection between the figurative modernity of Picasso and the worlds most famous abstract expressionist. Whilest the permanent collection is a minor if visitable gathering of the usual artistic suspects upstairs in the museum, the yawnsome art school conceptualism of Vernon Fisher is perhaps best avoided. Obsessive and self indulgent, there is not a single stand out piece that as an art collector I would want to own. Is this the standard by which contemporary art should be judged? Or is the intellectual journey writ large on the gallery wall justification enough for such arts existence? Vernon Is a Fort Worth Artist made good, for this I give him and the gallery credit. Galleries should push local talent, but is this the best that Texas in general and Fort Worth in particular has to offer? I think not.