ART INFLUENCERS As the entire art community is thrust into finding new channels for creativity, we celebrate several passionate leaders committed to the future. BY LEE CULLUM AND NANCY COHEN ISRAEL
“O
n or about December 1910, human character changed.” So wrote Virginia Woolf. Similarly, on or about March 11, 2020, the world changed. Echoing the Black Death, which killed one third of Europeans in the mid-1300s, Covid-19, a coronavirus originating in China, stormed the US by way of Europe, shutting down the most extraverted nation on earth—equal only to Italy in its love of life out in the open, shunning solitude, as close to the madding crowd as humanly possible. The first plague was caused by rats, some say, and the second by bats. The first, in the 14th century, profoundly affected art and literature, turning them to a dark embrace of the “dance of death.” The second, here in our own time, surely will have a heavy impact as well. Not yet revealed, it no doubt will be mediated by “influencers”—too trivial a term perhaps, for the arbiters of art on whom we must rely to mend the sudden discontinuity of culture in Dallas. Here are some of them. There are many more.
SUMMER 2020
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