Category: people

Artist Rockwell Kent was once the darling of the schoolboy set, renowned for his illustrated versions of Shakespeare and Moby Dick. But Kent was also an avowed Communist and staunch defender of the Soviet Union whose political leanings led to a high-profile tiff with a small museum in Maine, which Kent accused of having refused an exhibition of his work. Now, nearly half a century after the flap, the Farnsworth Museum has mounted an exhibition focusing on the controversy, and attempting to refute Kent’s claims of anti-Communist hysteria.

The name Nikolai Getman probably doesn’t ring a lot of bells in the Western art world, and in fact, when the octogenarian survivor of Stalin’s infamous Siberian Gulag died quietly in Russia last month, his passing didn’t make the obituary page of a single American newspaper. But Getman’s body of work represents the most complete and vivid visual record of life in the Gulag that the world has ever seen, and the horrors he recorded on canvas are a reminder of one of the great man-made tragedies of the last century.

The New York Times has finally assigned an arts columnist to write about the avant-garde. But is it too late? “Many say that no real avant-garde – which I’ll define as a combative group of free-thinking artists – can exist anymore. The media’s reach is too vast. New artists and movements get snatched up too quickly. If they are popular they get overexposed and stale. If they are not popular they disappear, and the marketeers decide they had better play it safe next time.” Still, the digital world has brought so many different types of art and free thinking together that the fusion of styles could be considered the new cutting edge.

When James Levine officially takes over the podium of the Boston Symphony Orchestra a month from now, the musical landscape of the city will be changed, for better or for worse. The BSO “has occupied a leading place among world orchestras for most of its existence, but it has been a while since it was consistently and unquestionably at the very top of the heap. The board, players, and public want that back, and many believe that Levine can lead the orchestra there.” Still, success in one city (New York, in this case,) doesn’t always translate into success in another, and there are still many uncertainties surrounding the new maestro.

The man behind the new Museum of the American Indian is visibly excited about this week’s opening. In fact, Richard West will be donning native garments and participating in a Cheyenne dance at Tuesday’s ceremonies. “From a native perspective, this is a powerfully affirming time in history. We should have been among the first threads of culture on the Mall. Instead we are the last. But, poetically, we occupy the first site next to the Capitol. There is poetry in that having belatedly gotten here, we occupy one of the two key sites on the National Mall.”

Felix Dennis is a billionaire. “He owns Stuff magazine. He owns The Week. His Maxim, where the staff calls their proprietor “the bearded dwarf,” is the biggest-selling “men’s lifestyle” publication in the world. His privately owned company, Dennis Publishing, has launched more than 40 magazines, typically with prosaic but profitable prescience: Computer Shopper used to carry more than 1,000 pages of advertisements in each issue. Now Dennis, 57, has decided to become a poet…”

A conservative US group is offering to exchange copies of the DVD of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 for copies of its book. “In urban areas, city leaders periodically sponsor gun `buy-back’ programs to help reduce gun violence. Similarly, the Fahrenheit 9/11 DVD Buy-Back program is designed to protect Americans from harm, especially young children who might accidentally slip this dangerous propaganda into the living room DVD player.”

They are: Elton John, soprano Dame Joan Sutherland, composer John Williams, and actors and producers Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, who have been married for 56 years, and actor, director and producer Warren Beatty. The awards will be presented December 4.

David Finckel and Wu Han, the new co-directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, could be said to be the poster children for 21st-century musical multitasking. The two are chamber music’s power couple of the moment, with Mr. Finckel best known as the cellist of the Emerson Quartet. They run their own internet-based record label, founded a stunningly successful chamber music festival in California last year, and each maintain a full performance schedule. Unusual? Sure. But in these days when classical music is increasingly serving a niche market, it takes that kind of dedication and willingness to diversify to succeed.

At the time of his Nobel Prize in 2001, Sir Vidia Naipaul claimed to be finished with fiction. There was nothing for him – or any other novelist – left to say. So why the new book of fiction?