Category: people

The former Getty president is returning to California State University system as a teacher and fundraiser. “University officials announced Friday that Munitz, 64, chancellor of the 23-campus system from 1991 to 1998, will hold the title of trustee professor. Along with teaching and administrative assignments, he will help raise money for a new center, the Institute for Urban School Leadership and the Integrated Sciences Complex, which is under construction.”

Kiki, 52, embraces craft, the dreaded C word of the art world. In myriad materials such as glass, fiber and beads (some associated more with amateurs and craft-show practitioners than with professional artists), she has embraced a dizzyingly diverse vocabulary of the demoted, debased and despised—and she makes you like it.

“Pramoedya is best known for his ‘Buru Quartet’ series retracing the rise of Indonesian nationalism in the first decades of the 20th century, a version differed from that of the government at the time. Hailed by many international critics as Indonesia’s leading modern novelist, his work has been translated into 30 languages.”

Mr. Galbraith was one of the most widely read authors in the history of economics; among his 33 books was “The Affluent Society” (1958), one of those rare works that forces a nation to re-examine its values. He wrote fluidly, even on complex topics, and many of his compelling phrases — among them “the affluent society,” “conventional wisdom” and “countervailing power” — became part of the language.

A new biography takes the measure of Clement Greenberg. “The power of critics such as Clement Greenberg in art or Edmund Wilson in literature — both did much to shape elite and popular taste in the mid-20th century — is hard to imagine today. Contemporary art is self-parodic and insulated against Greenberg’s style of criticism, and art-world success is now determined almost exclusively in the marketplace, not on the printed page.”

“Jacobs’ long run as a complex, down-to-earth Cassandra: a woman who wore comfortable shoes while dishing out uncomfortable truths, who kept her ear to the ground while trying to topple giants. What Jacobs hated most — what she saw in Robert Moses, and what she always tried to avoid in her own public appearances after she gained a measure of fame — was what she called the “Olympian vantage point” of the planners who were trying in the postwar years to apply the spare, muscular forms of Modern architecture to the design of entire cities, hollowing out old neighborhoods and running giant overpasses along waterfront promenades.”

John Foulds is best remembered these days as a footnote in the history of early 20th century music, but if conductor Sakari Oramo and critic Malcolm MacDonald have their way, Foulds will soon join the ranks of the century’s best composers.

John Betjeman may not be a household name in America, but to Britons, he was an adored figure and a beloved poet laureate. This summer, the UK will mark Betjeman’s centenary, and the country’s DJs will be celebrating his legacy as a pioneer in the world of… funk? Well, yes: “In 1974, at the age of 67, Betjeman launched an extraordinary new recording career. He released the album Banana Blush on the Charisma label – then best known for Genesis and other prog-rock travellers such as Van der Graaf Generator.”

“The chance discovery in a Harrogate bookshop in 2001, by the painter Christopher P Wood, of six volumes of an engraved Victorian art history, wildly and exuberantly annotated in a series of Picasso-esque drawings and collages by the then completely forgotten painter Joash Woodrow, led directly to the re-emergence of one of the most significant artistic figures in postwar British art… In the months that followed, it became apparent that this was no isolated figure at the margins of art history but an artist of sophisticated interests and training.”

Oliver Knussen has been awarded Northwestern University’s biennial $100,000 Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Musical Composition. “Knussen was praised by the anonymous, three-member selection committee for his ‘uniquely focused, vibrantly varied music and his total embrace—as a profoundly influential composer, conductor, and educator—of today’s musical culture.’ One of Knussen’s works will be performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra during the 2007-08 season; he will also visit Chicago for a residency at Northwestern’s School of Music.”