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Each spring, the Dallas Museum of Art hosts an expensive fundraiser called the Art Ball. It costs $2,500 bucks to attend, features a live auction and, this year, an after-party DJed by Solange Knowles. This year’s ball went down Saturday night. None of that really matters, though. What matters is, for the past couple of years, the museum has made a parody video to celebrate the occasion. This year’s video features DMA Director Max Anderson fronting a lip synching of Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk.” It’s not particularly funny and almost unbearably dorky, but it does feature Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings with his hair up in curlers.
Unfair Park doesn’t really have an opinion on any of this, but it’s worth noting something Peter Simek said for D Magazine:
It’s not the first time Rawlings has appeared in an Art Ball video. You may remember the Downton Artsy-spoof shot a few years ago in which Rawlings stars as the servant of an aristocratic family made up the city’s top-tier cultural patrons. In hindsight, it is a curious image to project in light of the ongoing debate over the Trinity Toll Road and the perception that the road’s core support rests in the mysterious shadows of Dallas’ fading oligarchy. As a friend commented, “Ronquillo has no chance of being mayor because he would be so out of place in these Art Ball videos.” What that says about Dallas or how this city works, I’m not sure.
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