Drug Money: Can marijuana fuel the arts? Er…let me rephrase that. Can profits from medical marijuana sustain an arts community? The New York Times reports on Life is Art, a foundation begun by a woman who used to run public arts programs in New Orleans, but, after Katrina, decided to try something different.  Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation is an inspiration. So’s Newmans Own.

“The foundation’s hope is that income from succeeding crops will fully support such projects, in perpetuity, creating a kind of Marfa-meets-ganja art retreat north of San Francisco and a new economic engine for art philanthropy.”

As we all know raising money for the arts in the down economy has been difficult. But this is a new spin.

“The whole game of finding support just started to seem so childish,” said Kirsha Kaechele, the foundation’s director, as she hauled a plastic tub of freshly harvested cannabis hybrid branches up a hill one morning recently on her rolling land just outside of Santa Rosa. “So I decided to grow up and became a marijuana farmer.”

RIP Dame Sutherland: Legendary opera singer Joan Sutherland died Sunday. Scott Cantrell notes that she began and ended her U.S. career in Dallas in this DMN appreciation. And here’s how she’s recalled in her native Australia.

Noted: The Wall Street Journal weighs in on James Magee and his masterwork, The Hill…. Pegasus reports Joe Scott, a Dallas ad copywriter, is trying to raise money to film his screenplay The Debut, and he’s got local musicians – and the internet – behind him.