Dallas, city of culture

When George W. Bush was outed as an artist, after a computer hacker uncovered his nude self-portraits, jaws dropped around the world. Could Cowboy George, a man whom even Kim Jong-il’s cronies dubbed a philistine, actually be a closet aesthete? This spring, at the first exhibition of his works in Dallas, he confessed: ‘There’s a Rembrandt trapped in this body.’ It shouldn’t come as such a surprise. Bush’s hometown of Dallas may be stereotyped as a cultural wasteland, synonymous with big oil, big hair and Wild West machismo, but it, too, has an artistic side the world is only now discovering.

Take the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination. Rather than marking it with a ghoulish spectacle, Dallas and its twin city, Fort Worth, held a joint art exhibition. Comprising masterpieces that hung in the Kennedys’ hotel suite on the president’s last night alive, the 2013 show included Monets, Picassos and Van Goghs.