Category: people

The new Getty Museum director spent his summers as a youth traveling to see art. “Hearing the music in Italy, going to temples in India, eating the food in France — those formative lessons helped shape Brand’s philosophy, his view of art. People who approach art purely through art history and European paintings, he said, might tend to look at paintings as two-dimensional things, of another time, to be purchased and put on a wall. But ‘my first experiences were more in places where there are rituals going on and there are people and sculptures and temples and sound’.”

Martha Thorne, an associate curator at the Art Institute of Chicago has been named executive director of the Pritzker Prize for architecture. “Thorne’s ascent to the paid, part-time Pritzker post marks the first time since the award was established in 1979 that it will be administered from Chicago, the hometown of the prize’s sponsor, the billionaire Pritzker family. Previous executive directors — including the late Brendan Gill, the New Yorker magazine’s architecture critic, and the immediate past executive director, Bill Lacy, former president of Purchase College — have been from the New York area.”

“Soprano Carol Vaness has withdrawn from a new production of Dukas’ Ariane et Barbe-bleue this fall at New York City Opera because of injuries suffered in a car accident earlier this summer, the company announced.”

“Michael Brecker, one of jazz’s most influential tenor saxophonists over the last quarter-century, has been forced to stop performing by blood and bone marrow disease and is searching for a stranger to save his life.”

Choire Sicha looks in on New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelmen’s new book on artists, and observes that “the mild-natured chief art critic of The New York Times, has been for a while now less a critic and more a hagiographer. He has seemed unwilling to use his position as a pulpit.”

Architect Zaha Hadid is finally getting her buildings built around the world. It took many years. “There is a certain uncompromising otherworldliness to Hadid. And this, combined with the wackiness of her designs, may account for why, for many years, she remained Britain’s great unbuilt architect. Many architects take a long time to come to the fore, but Hadid’s incubation period stretched for nearly 25 years.”

Playwright Dario Fo makes a rare public appearance. “Asked what his advice would be for writers who had not yet reached his level of achievement and recognition, an amiable Fo said: ‘It is not just a question of experience, nor is it a question of age … There are some people who live only 20 years, but many, many people remember them because they knew how to live the time that was given to them. I’m not suggesting that you should live only 20 years. Live as long as you can, but from time to time, think ’20 years, 20 years, 20 years’, and put them together’.”

Prominent Australian artist Richard Dunlop has exhibited in galleries around Australia and has lectured at universities. “On Friday police raided his house, seizing prints, oils and sketches.” He’s being charged with stealing artwork worth up to $1 million “from a gallery in Brisbane in 1994 and from a Sydney gallery owned by the prominent dealer Ray Hughes between 1996 and 2003. Hundreds of pieces are believed to be involved.”

The Canadian Post Office has created its first stamp honoring a living person – jazz legend Oscar Peterson. “It was a special 80th birthday tribute to Canada’s legendary jazz pianist. Peterson said he always considered himself proud to be a Canadian, “But to have the honour of this stamp issued in my likeness goes beyond my wildest dreams.”

Philadelphia Daily News movie critic Gary Thompson interviewed director John Singleton last week and by mistake walked away with Singleton’s wallet. The director, unable to board a plane for his next appointment had an assistant fly from LA with Singleton’s passport, before Thompson realized he’d taken the wallet by mistake and returned it…