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Modern problems: why Dallas is embracing an old architectural vision of what the world could be.

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"It's like the Vatican," remarked my well-traveled teenage daughter as we eyed the line stretching down West Fifty-third Street from New York's Museum of Modern Art, an onslaught of sweaty pilgrims undeterred by the shopping-mall stampede or the $20 admission fee. And it wasn't just us out-of-towners who were struck by the crush of humanity at modernism's most sacred shrine. "Have you seen the ticket lines lately?" a New York Times art critic incredulously queried his readers not long after our July visit, marveling at MoMA's flip-flop-shod "armies" of visitors. [paragraph] The army of the faithful at MoMA, however, is just one small piece of an entirely unexpected cultural revival--if not revolution--that is going on in places as diverse as Fort Worth, Dubai, and Shanghai. Modernism, the twentieth century's tradition-flaunting vanguard culture, was widely considered history well before the beginning of this century, a little-lamented victim of its own ratified aesthetics and overweening ambitions. And with the current zeitgeist all about clashing civilizations and the revival of religious fundamentalism in both the West and the Middle East, we couldn't have a more unlikely moment for the resurrection of modernism's liberal, secular humanist, one-world vision. But it's not just that modernism is miraculously back from the dead: Last century's avant-garde is starting to look like the surprise winner in this century's culture wars. [paragraph] The aesthetics that once offended so many are now transcending our growing divisions over politics and class. At the high end, the mushrooming global plutocracy has made modernism the house style, with works by living masters like Jasper Johns and Port Arthur expatriate Robert Rauschenberg now well into eight figures. Deceased moderns can add another zero; last year an iconic 1948 drip painting by American Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock was sold for $140 million to an anonymous buyer, rumored to be a London-based Mexican financier.

But these days...

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