Category: people

A low-key collector is making waves in London, buying up entire shows of work before they even hit galleries. “A genial Rory Bremner look-alike with a facility for imitating accents, David Roberts doesn’t flaunt his wealth. But he is rapidly becoming one of the most sought-after clients by contemporary-art galleries in the UK.”

Last month a man tripped down some stairs in a museum and broke some Chinese vases. “Nick Flynn, of Fowlmere, Cambridgeshire, said disaster struck after he realised he had gone up the wrong staircase and swung around to come down. He trod on his untied shoelace and fell forward. ‘I was trying to grab hold of something but the walls were smooth marble and I couldn’t stop myself’.”

Martin Feinstein, who helped build the Kennedy Center into a significant artistic institution in the 1970s and then put the Washington Opera on the map in the 1980s and ’90s, was an irrepressible entertainer.

“Paik understood the challenge of the new age he helped usher in. He maintained that the central objective in combining art and technology was ‘not how to make another scientific toy, but how to humanize the technology and the electronic medium.’ For him, humanization involved a giddy, celebratory joyfulness. His aim, he once said, was a ‘TV version of Vivaldi’.”

Lloyd Sullivan has spent almost two decades and as much as $1-million trying to prove that the portait his family has owned for more than four centuries is that of William Shakespeare. “Events in the last year have convinced Sullivan that his heirloom is within striking distance of being named an authentic lifetime likeness of Shakespeare. If he’s right, the painting could be worth as much as $20-million. Certainly it’s a claim that’s going to receive renewed attention this spring as a much-anticipated Shakespeare-themed art exhibition goes up in London.”

The composer has written 101 movie scores and has been nominated for 45 Oscars, “tying the record for best-score nominations set by his mentor, Alfred Newman. Williams is now the second-most-nominated person ever, after Walt Disney (with 59).”

“Life isn’t getting easier for Simon Rattle. The golden boy of classical music who seemed incapable of wrong moves has become the single most visible conductor in the world – while having a contentious split from his second wife, losing sleep thanks to Jonah, his 11-month-old son with his new partner, Czech mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozená, and, as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, receiving unnervingly polarized reactions from critics and audiences… He also faces chronic funding uncertainty with his home orchestra, whose city of residence is virtually bankrupt. Even a sunny, seemingly unflappable personality like Rattle’s can’t whitewash these circumstances. Can the collective wear and tear be worth it?”

Wendy “Wasserstein’s humor contributed to feminist discourse in the theatre in numerous ways. Her plays are simply funny, and tweak the stereotype of feminists as humorless and strident. She wrote bright, comic plays with a twinge of sadness, melancholy that became more evident and more cutting as her career went on.”

Terry teachout wasn’t a fan: “In fact, I didn’t think much of any of Wasserstein’s plays, and I dreaded having to say so in print, since she was an exceedingly nice lady. I fudged the point in my review, calling her “one of our best theatrical journalists, a keen-eared social observer with a knack for summing up cultural watershed moments like the coming of age of the baby boomers and putting them on stage to memorable effect.” All true, and none of it incompatible with the fact that I considered her to be a glib, punch-pulling lightweight, a kind of feminist Neil Simon who never cut too close to the knuckle.”

“In a sense, Wasserstein made Broadway safe for feminism, in a wave of women dramatists (Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, Tina Howe) who cracked the male-dominated repertoire of Broadway and regional theater in the 1980s. Ms. Wasserstein’s penchant for writing appealing romantic comedies made her work more commercially viable than that of most of her peers. And while clearly expressing a belief in equal rights, she was just as focused on depicting a post-feminist ambivalence many women in her audiences shared.”