Lone Star Stadium of Art

The Dallas Cowboys didn't make it to the Super Bowl this year, but next February Super Bowl XLV will make it to Dallas—or, rather, to nearby Arlington and its spectacular Cowboys Stadium, which opened last summer to the tune of $1.15 billion. When the 100,000 fans from all over converge in 2011, they'll see something that Dallas fans have experienced all season: real art in a sports stadium.

Artwork at Dallas Cowboys Stadium
The new stadium of the Dallas Cowboys also doubles a venue of another sort—an art gallery. A collection of 19 commissioned and original pieces by both established and emerging contemporary artists are on view. Here's a look at some of the works on display at Cowboys Stadium.

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Dallas Cowboys
Franz Ackermann's "(Meet Me) At the Waterfall"

I don't mean bronze statues of former Cowboys greats like Troy Aikman and Tony Dorsett or the flamboyant paintings of Leroy Neiman. I mean big, bold displays of site-specific, privately commissioned and funded pieces, mostly abstract, by 14 living artists, some local, some internationally recognized (Mel Bochner, Olafur Eliasson). Previously created art has also been purchased to fill some of the space. Twelve of the artists were on hand here in early March for the unveiling of the latest work, a 4,000-square-foot, jigsaw-puzzle-looking piece by Jim Isermann.

And why shouldn't a stadium have art? Sporting venues in the ancient world had it, impressive and brilliantly colored. Besides, football and Texas go together; Texas and money go together; money and art go together. Voilà: Football and art go together.

It's quite something, this stadium, even without the art. Right off an interstate highway between Dallas and Fort Worth, down the pike from Six Flags Over Texas and across a divide from the bland, conventional red-brick Texas Rangers stadium, it shimmers on the plain, a technological wonder, like a giant flying saucer, all canted and curved glass, supported by exterior arched trusses. Inside, the stadium's two most prominent features are its retractable roof and the gigantic Mitsubishi TV screens to which spectators, especially those not in the best seats, can glue their attention.

But with the art, Cowboys Stadium gives new meaning to the twin notions of artistic size and artistic patronage. The brains and the purse strings behind the art projects belong to Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and his wife, Gene, whose domestic tastes run to Norman Rockwell, with additional support from family members and a team of advisers that includes local museum officials and collectors. "Keeping up with the Joneses" may soon acquire new connotations for, and also inspire, other sports franchises.

When the stadium was under construction, the invited artists came to look at the space, the light, the technology and the available sites within. To maintain the upbeat feeling appropriate to sports, all of them have tried to capture in their work the energy and power of athletes and athletic contests. The largest pieces, brightly colored, are located in vast concourses, over concession stands and restrooms, across from popcorn and nacho vendors.

Daniel Buren's "Unexpected Variable Configurations: A Work in Situ" (an acquisition), 21 feet by 118 feet, consists of identical painted yellow squares punctuated by randomly placed black and white panels. Franz Ackermann's double work "Coming Home" and "(Meet Me) At the Waterfall" (a commission) tackles the problem of a wrap-around space on two walls. You view it as you rise or descend an escalator, experiencing its Kandinsky-like colors and throbbing shapes from a variety of constantly moving positions. Trenton Doyle Hancock's vinyl print "From a Legend to a Choir" is an enormous cartoon (45 feet by 98 feet) of primary colors run wild, located on a ramp wall. Just as large, but more quiet, Mr. Isermann's "Untitled" is a reminder of Vasarely's 1960s Op Art, in this case expanded into an entire wall covered with vacuum-formed styrene in subtle shadings of white and gray.

Some of the work is smaller or more conventional. Wayne Gonzales's beautiful triptych "Cheering Crowd" (acrylic on canvas, an acquisition), 84 inches by 252 inches, is three panels, each of which pictures the same scene, all drawn from an Internet photo of a crowd at a Nascar race. In one entrance to the main concourse hangs "Coin Toss," a delicate geometric piece commissioned from Texas artist Annette Lawrence that consists of 41 metal cables strung like a lyre between two facing walls. It holds the space together and focuses the attention upward. At another entrance—on two walls and the ceiling between them—is Matthew Ritchie's enchanting "Line of Play" made of powder-coated aluminum, vinyl and acrylic. It's a deft, lively homage to the lines football coaches make when working out maneuvers on paper or computer, and it seems to exist in a middle field somewhere between two and three dimensions.

As in the ancient world, today's sports venues bear witness to a democratic impulse. They are gathering places that bring together people of varying tastes and sensibilities. The emperor of Rome may have had a special place of prominence at the Colosseum, but he sat on stone like everyone else. Today's stadiums have private, sealed-in boxes of unimagined splendor. Democracy and oligarchy go hand-in-hand. At Cowboys Stadium, some of the most beautiful art pieces are hanging in the Owner's Club, itself a spacious lounge that looks like a glamorous hotel lobby or the fanciest airport Admiral's Club you'll ever see, into which hoi polloi do not enter except on private tours.

The common folk will miss, alas, Jacqueline Humphries's "Blondnoir," oil and enamel on linen, a work created by painting, then overlaying the painted surface with tape, then stripping the tape, then repainting on top, until the result hypnotically takes the viewer in, as if for a rare moment of serenity in the midst of all the football hullabaloo outside. Many of the works here activate the space around them, by domesticating or enlarging it.

How do the artists and patrons want spectators to experience this art? A stadium, unlike a museum or a church, is no place for leisurely contemplation. Football enthusiasts will be rushing to the game. But any of these pieces may engage the attention of the viewer, if only subliminally or momentarily, and even though they are meant to be seen by people in hot pursuit of athletic victory, not aesthetic reverie. Some fans will pause in their tracks and take in these works. And then the art will, mysteriously, have stimulated and refreshed viewers who may never have set foot inside an art museum.

Mr. Spiegelman, the Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University, writes about the arts for the Journal. His latest book is "Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness" (Farrar Straus Giroux).