There's no right way to look at sculpture: The Dallas Arts District's latest landmark, the Nasher Sculpture Center, will be a rotating display of one of the world's greatest collections of modern sculpture. Ranging from the late 19th century to the present, the collection includes works by Auguste Rodin, Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Henry Moore, Alexander Calder and Richard Serra. And the building itself is the work of a real artist among architects, Renzo Piano.

Nasher Sculpture Center: One of the lessons of 20th-century art is that art doesn't have to be serious. It can be playful, even downright irreverent. Even abstraction can be fun, as Alexander Calder proves with The Spider, a suspended mobile of black-painted steel panels and rods. Roy Lichtenstein's Double Glass is a kind of 3-D cartoon of two glasses, in bright colors. Even Picasso's Head of a Woman – the one outside in pebbly concrete – playfully reduces the head to front and side planes, with cartoonish eyes, eyebrows and hair. If it doesn't make you smile, you're taking life much too seriously.