Category: people

“He is one of the fathers of postmodern literary criticism – the general gist of his approach being that it doesn’t matter what an author intends to say, readers are entitled to interpret works of literature in any way they choose. He was also a pioneer of semiotics, the study of culture as a web of signs and messages to be decoded for hidden meaning. Doesn’t it drive him mad, always seeing meaning where others just see things? “

Paul Ricoeur, the great French humanist philosopher, died last Friday at the age of 92. But “it is Tuesday already, and nobody in the American media has insulted Ricoeur yet. What’s going on? Have our pundits lost their commitment to mocking European intellectuals and the pointy-headed professors who read them?”

Controversial British artist Tracey Emin has made a career out of being alternately outrageous and outraged, creating works that demand attention but decrying the bad press she gets. It might be a recipe for modern pop culture success, but it doesn’t seem to make for a very stable head space. “[Emin] is, it hardly needs saying, a survivor, and her often harrowing struggle with the world, and with herself, is the narrative that threads through all her work. It’s all there – the teenage rapes, the abortions, the cruel and tender boyfriends, the depressions and suicide attempts, the memory of them stitched into her angry, appliquŽd quilts, dragged up though her scratchy, sad drawings, writ large in her scrawled, dysfunctional sentences that look like they have been scratched into the paper as if her life depended upon it.”

Freud is one of our most famous living artists and very exacting about which of his work is released. “Lucian has put his foot through at least half of his paintings. There comes a point, and it may be months into a painting, when he has to make a crucial decision between options on the canvas. He will hazard the success of a nearly finished painting, possibly worth millions, on one decision that can’t be undone. If he realises that he’s made the wrong choice, he’ll slash it, destroy it.”

The debate is raging over the legacy of Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins. “Was he a heroic figure, a paragon of artistic integrity whose paintings of oarsmen, swimmers, family members and the distinguished citizens of Philadelphia expressed America’s emerging power in the 19th century? Or was he, as the art historian Henry Adams depicts him in a new biography, a tormented soul, afraid of going insane like his mother, sexually ambivalent, a bully, an exhibitionist, a voyeur who was possibly guilty of bestiality and of incest with female relatives?” That’s a wide interpretive gap, and scholars throughout the art world are lining up to argue the case. But the truth is likely somewhere in between…

Henri Matisse probably should have died in his early seventies, when cancer ravaged his body and he prepared his family for his demise under a surgeon’s knife. “But when the surgery was successful, Matisse quickly bounced back, declaring that he had won ‘a second life’ and, at 71, led his art in remarkable new directions… The 13 fruitful years that he unexpectedly gained after his cancer operation are the focus of ‘Matisse: A Second Life,’ an invigorating new exhibition at the Musée de Luxembourg.”

Valentin Berlinsky has been a member of the Borodin String Quartet since its first concert. “It is rare for a quartet to have an unbroken history of 60 years, unique for the same artist to have been a member throughout. While there have been changes of occupancy in the other three seats over the years, Berlinsky, now a nimble 80-year-old, took part in the quartet’s first public concerts in 1945 (when it was known as the Moscow Conservatoire Quartet) and has been its common thread ever since.”

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was the greatest lieder singer of he 20th Century. “It is more than 12 years since the most influential singer of the 20th century stepped quietly out of the limelight and brought the curtain down on his 50-year career. Now, to mark his 80th birthday on May 28, there will be ceremonies and awards; a new pictorial biography by Hans Neunzig; large selections from his enormous recorded legacy are poised for reissue by DG; and the singer himself is giving a steady stream of interviews in the Berlin house where he has lived for more than half a century.”

More than 10 years after a controversial essay trashing his work appeared in the New Yorker, Bill T. Jones still finds himself having to defend himself. “An articulate and forceful advocate for his work and his company, Jones is keenly analytical and self-aware. In conversation, he spools off tightly argued paragraphs aglint with references to John Cage, Euripides, Merce Cunningham, high modernism, Marcel Proust, avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage and Krishna consciousness. His programs invite viewers to trace references, make comparisons and find patterns.”

Artist Steven Kurtz, who has been investigated for bio-terrorism because of his artwork, has condemned the government’s investigation. “There’s no doubt that this is a politically motivated case, to my mind. Look back to the tendencies of the government and the Department of Justice. . . . There’s fanaticism in the air. I think we’re in a very unfortunate moment now in U.S. history. A form of neo-McCarthyism has made a comeback. . . . We’re going to see a whole host of politically motivated trials which have nothing to do with crime but everything to do with artistic expression.”