Dallas was a woman yesterday, great and sprawling and imperious. I haven't been to Dallas since I moved to Austin 8 years ago. This is an embarrassing fact because there is lots of good art in Dallas and it's not too far away.

I took my time driving on the way up--as all my trips recently, this one was as much about the voyage as about the destination. I stopped here and there, sketched this and that, and snapped photos of the satellite dishes at KCEN-TV. The head engineer was not too happy about this and demanded my credentials. I showed him my sketchbook. He liked the drawings and went through them one by one telling me all the reasons the satellite dishes I had drawn were inaccurate and would never work. This was good information, and I filed it away for my continuing work on the space stories and drawings. I took a few more pictures and headed off. By the way, this was the guy that shot the video of the space shuttle Columbia as it burned up on reentry a few years ago.

No one was at Dunn and Brown Contemporary when I went in; as it turned out they were between installations. Trenton Doyle Hancock was mostly installed, however, including one huge, direct-on-the-wall work--a trend I'm frankly getting a little sick of. I discovered that I didn't like the big fabric pieces as much--they seem too self-consciously anxious about avoiding beauty, but I loved the small drawing-based paintings, which were just weird and disturbed. He seems to have been looking at Hieronymus Bosch. Next door was a series of heart-breakingly simple and engaging Louise Bourgeois drawings, all lined up on the floor.

The space-invaders show at UT Dallas was worth the trip out north to Richardson. A few gems here: Raychael Stine's confusing and confused animal paintings that somehow inject a little bit of pop onto an expressionist canvas. Same with Ed Blackburn's acrylic paintings, though with the accents reversed. Also some nice moments in Lily Hanson's fabric sculptures. (left, Raychael Stine)

But also an awful lot of ironic tributes to the fact that pure abstraction has been quite picked over by now and you'd better be prepared to go deep if you want to say something interesting. Robert Daniel Flowers's digital animation would have been revelatory 7 years ago; now it's just a screensaver. Tom Orr's striped panels seem like a lot of work to reveal ultimately very little other than about 3 and a half seconds of retinal pleasure. (right, Tom Orr)

There was a time not long ago when all of this would have stopped me from liking the work. I'm able to like things on different levels now. I'm able to like things even when they seem to fall short.

Often.

This is a relief.

Still, looking around the gallery, I couldn't help but notice the frequent tendency toward cleverness and slickness. That plague shows no sign of abating, that we as artists want to be so fucking clever all the time, and that that should substitute for being honest. Honesty is hard--I rarely get to it myself--but the effort, God, why else do this?

Honesty? I mean, if you ever stifle an impulse toward beauty or ugliness, clumsiness or elegance, openness or obscurity, then you are not honest. If you want to be funny but keep a straight face instead, if you want to be serious but laugh it off, then you are not honest. If you are making work and the thought in your head is, "this will totally wow 'em," or "so-and-so will think this is so cool," then you are not honest. If you are making work and simultaneously composing the paragraph about yourself that you imagine will appear in all the art history books or in the newspaper or in the press release, you are not honest. If you look at your own work and say, "shit, that looks too much like artist X; let me change it," or, "dammit, I have to make it look more like artist Y," then you are not honest. If you pursue something only because it's sure to gain the respect of your peers, your teacher, a curator, a gallerist, your father, or your girlfriend, you are not honest. If you do something only because it is sure to piss off anyone from that same list, you are not honest. If you neglect your desire to do X because everybody has come to expect Y from you, then you are not honest. And if you're an artist and claim never to have had one of these moments, then you are really not honest.

It's tough. Do you sometimes have to trade honesty to make a living? Probably. But that doesn't turn the dishonesty into honesty, it only turns it into a paycheck. And maybe that's ok sometimes. See, I'm still a purist, but no longer an extremist.

I attended the Austin Museum of Art's 22 to Watch opening on Friday. This is the show that I was shortlisted for back in January and then subsequently booted from. Anyway, Sterling Allen is an artist that almost nobody talks about, probably because his demeanor is so yin, so understated. I admit I had to meet him 2 or 3 times before his face stuck in my mind. His drawings are awkward, beautiful, dumb and transcendent, and totally honest. Worth the price of admission. (left, Sterling Allen)

Meanwhile, I was hoping that I would like Jason Singleton's entry because I like him and had a good time with him at Peat's party the other night. But after finding out that the artwork consisted of the museum's hours and admission fees scraped off the front window and run backwards on the inside of the glass, I just wanted to ask him, "why do you hate your audience so much? Why would you want to treat people with such disdain?" My options are a) to be annoyed [or "frustrated" as the catalog description would have it] or b) to decide that I "get it," that I'm in on the joke and that this work is really designed to annoy some hypothetical lesser minds out there. Neither of those is an appealing option.

Elsewhere, Michael Osborne's freeway overpass photographs are still revealing worlds. Alia Hasan-Khan's postcards detailing the difficulties middle eastern and south Asian people have had in airports since 9/11 were slyly affecting. There were others, too. Zack Booth Simpson's immersive computer game, Young-Min Kang's cut paper fantasms. Go see the show. Some parts are more successful than others, but there is enough honest searching here to be worth the trip.

UPDATE: This is what you get when you try to look at art through people at a crowded opening and then rely on written descriptions to fill in what you couldn't see. You run the risk of misrepresenting someone's art, which I believe I did with Jason Singleton's work. Apparently it also involves mirrors in some way, though I missed this. The gist of the work seems to be the same, however, so I don't know that my opinion changes, but I at least owe it to the art to get the description correct.

Hey Cinque, I'm really not honest when I look at your honesty paragraph. I think maybe you are not honest only when you do one of the things you listed and then don't admit to it. But then again honesty and art don't mix to me. Art might be fiction.

Hey, would you mind covering the AMOA show a bit more? Can you take photos? If so please do. I'm really curious to see more.

Hey Roy,

Re: honesty, to some extent that goes without saying. Nobody ever puts up a show and says, "Oh yeah, I did this because I really, really want my professor to think I'm OK," or "Actually, I thought about doing a painting of a bunny in a meadow, but I knew my friends from school would laugh at me, so I did this instead." No one's going to say that. In fact, most artists I think won't even be consciously aware of having made that choice. That's my educated guess based on my own experience of how difficult it is to get to honesty as an artist.

Just to clarify: the way I'm using "honesty" is not, I repeat, not synonymous with confessionalism or autobiography, nor is it synonymous with some notion of documentary-style "truth" (though a work could of course be any of those things and honest to boot, but that would be merely coincidence).

I'm speaking of honest as opposed to the manipulative stuff. The stuff that is treacly sweet as a way of covering up experience rather than revealing it, or that is acidly bitter as a way of covering up a lack of ideas. Or the works that use obscurity as a strategy for getting around actually saying something, not in a didactic way, but in an experiential way.

Yes, I think that art is fiction. But fiction is not dishonesty. Fiction is always a metaphorical transformation of some level of experienced reality. No? The best fiction is also absolutely honest.

Yeah, I'm not sure about covering the AMOA show any more. We'll see. Besides, it seems the current trend is to be stupidly afraid of photography.

We could get into a big honesty debate, but I'm too tired.

But seriously, what is up with the no photo thing? Makes no sense, unless you are using a flash and what you are photoing is older than great grandma. Does Dana Friis-Hansen run the museum that way? I bet not. If so, we might ask him to nix that rule. I wonder what the reasoning is?

Yes, we could and someday we will :-)

The photo thing sucks. Having been personally squashed at the High in Atlanta, the Whitney in New York and SITE Santa Fe, it seems that paranoia is all the rage. At SITE I was told by the rather well-meaning counter woman that the ban on photography was so that I couldn't take pictures of the artwork and then try to sell those as the original works.

Um...ok.