Category: people

The new president of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museums comes from a corporate background, but boasts of a lifetime spent appreciating and supporting art. His duties will include keeping the bottom line healthy while simultaneously increasing the museums’ community profile and national prestige. “The museums, founded by Andrew Carnegie 110 years ago, are comprised of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Carnegie Science Center and The Andy Warhol Museum.”

“In his former life, Clive Wearing was a music producer for the BBC and the choirmaster of the renowned London Sinfonietta ensemble — but all that has been deleted out of his memory. Life before the illness has left few traces. Garden variety amnesia — people forget about their past lives — is not terribly uncommon. But forgetting on a continuous basis; that is very rare indeed. To Clive Wearing, the world is an ongoing riddle. He looks around and sees an unfamiliar room. Frequently, strangers stand in front of him and claim to be nurses. They claim that he has been living here for many years. All Wearing knows is: He has just woken up from a deep haze. For 20 years Clive Wearing has been continuously waking up.”

The ex-concertmaster of the Seattle Symphony has settled with his ex-stand partner over comments he made on his blog. “I regret having posted statements that were interpreted as being about my former stand partner, now the acting concertmaster of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. It is my understanding that some people have come to misapprehend my remarks which were intended to be humorous.”

The Metropolitan Opera holds a celebration of Mirella Freni’s 40 years singing there. “At 70, Ms. Freni was reminding audiences that she would be by far the most interesting singer at her own gala. Not that the Met wasn’t offering some of its best to join her onstage; the program inadvertently seemed to confess that today’s stars are fewer and lesser than those who surrounded the honoree when she was in her prime a generation ago.”

“Thanks to Nicholas Serota, Britain now has the most popular museum of modern art in the world. While the Pompidou Centre in Paris is visited by 3.5 million people annually, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art gained a million visitors from its reopening in November 2004 to March 2005, Tate Modern, which yesterday celebrated its fifth anniversary, is attracting more than 4 million visitors each year. This is a great coup, particularly since, by Serota’s own admission, Tate Modern’s permanent collection is fourth-rate, particularly weak in early 20th century art.”

“Matthew Epstein, who left Lyric Opera of Chicago last month after a 25-year association, has returned to his former home base at Columbia Artists Management Inc. in New York. He agreed to a five-year contract as director of the company’s various vocal divisions. Currently celebrating its 75th anniversary, CAMI is one of world’s most prestigious artist management firms.”

A new exhibit at the New York Public Library is prompting a scholarly reexamination of the life and work of civil rights leader Malcolm X. The artifacts and writings from the life of the controversial activist provide a more complete look at the life of a highly complex thinker than has ever previously been available to the public, and “the exhibition also represents an end to a wrenching public struggle over their ownership of Malcolm X’s personal effects. After almost being auctioned in 2002, most of the items were reclaimed by the family, which deposited them with the [library] in 2003.”

You won’t usually find Alice Walton’s name listed among America’s more prominent art collectors, but the WalMart heiress has spent the last 15 years amassing an impressive array of American art. “Slowly and methodically, Ms. Walton has paid top dollar at auction and through dealers for the best paintings, drawings and sculptures she can find by artists like Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, George Bellows, Marsden Hartley and Charles Willson Peale. The goal, the family foundation says, is to start a museum in Bentonville, Ark., where her father, Sam Walton, opened his first retail store in 1951.”

“Jock Soto retires from the New York City Ballet’s stage on June 19 at the age of 40, after 25 years with the company. For the latter part of that period he has been extolled as a partner—as if that were his main (even sole) virtue, as was, essentially, the case with the company’s Conrad Ludlow in the past and Charles Askegard today.” But there was so much more to his dancing…

“Benjamin Mordecai, associate dean of the Yale School of Drama, prolific commercial theatrical producer and nurturer of playwright August Wilson’s 10-play cycle, died Sunday of cancer at the Yale. Wilson acknowledged his debt to his producer and friend, who helped develop the regional theater circuit where Wilson worked on his plays as they made their way to New York. Wilson said there were only two constants in the 10 plays: himself and Mordecai.”