Category: people

Retreating from its original investigations of artist Steve Kurtz for “bioterrorism”, the US Attorney has charged the artist with mail fraud. “The charges do not relate to bioterrorism,” U.S. Attorney Michael Battle said. “Very simply, this is a case about fraud.”

Artist Steve Kurtz, who has been investigated by the FBI for bioterrorism was finally charged Thursday by a federal grand jury in Buffalo, New York– but “not with bioterrorism, as listed on the Joint Terrorism Task Force’s original search warrant and subpoenas, but with petty larceny. Also indicted was Robert Ferrell, head of the Department of Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Public Health. The charges concern technicalities of how Ferrell helped Kurtz to obtain $256 worth of harmless bacteria for one of Kurtz’s art projects. The laws under which the indictments were obtained covering mail and wire fraud–are normally used against those defrauding others of money or property, as in telemarketing schemes.”

Warren Lieberfarb is known in Hollywood as the “father of the DVD.” DVD’s of course, have earned movie studios billions of dollars of revenue, eclipsing what movies make in the theatres. So why did such an important guy get bounced out of his job?

Alex Melamid is at it again. In his latest project designed to make his audience question artworld assumptions, he propses that art is the new religion. “In his current Art Ministry project, Mr. Melamid uses religion as a lens through which to examine the ingrained pieties and genius worship of museum culture. ‘The whole idea of art is based on belief. You cannot explain it, you cannot understand it. Just try reading art criticism — all you can do is have faith’.”

“Eli Langer, the artist most famous for having beaten Canada’s child-pornography law on a defence of ‘artistic merit,’ says he’d like to ‘pass the mantle on to some other artist, some other case.’ After more than a decade of being the one everybody calls when threats of censorship erupt, he wants to stop “contextualizing myself within the dialogue of child pornography in Canada’ and get on with his real life as a figurative painter.”

The director of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg has blasted a concert by Paul McCartney outside the city’s Winter Palace. “We prepared for this concert like we would for a flood, all the museum’s departments were put on alert,” the director said, contending that the noise level alone was “damaging” for some of the famous works in the Hermitage collection.”

Ray Bradbury made his career on being a man of the future. His science fiction set the tone of the future. At 84, he now seems firmly rooted in the past. Bradbury is famously anachronistic, a science-fiction writer who has never driven a car or used a computer. “I’ve got three typewriters,” he will later tell me. “I don’t need a computer.” When I call, his line is busy, indicating an absence of call waiting.”

A new film examining the tragic life and career of British conductor Sir Eugene Goossens is screening at the Sydney Film Festival, “impelling Australians to reflect on a shameful episode in their past.” Goossens was brought to Australia to lead the Sydney Symphony in the 1950s, but his promising career was cut short when he was fired and deported after airport authorities discovered pornographic photos in his luggage. Goossens died in disgrace in London, but the film portrays him as “a victim of the tabloid press and a morally zealous vice squad detective.”

New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp’s retirement from the architecture beat is “a relief to a new crop of editors unwilling to defend, as their predecessors did, the critic’s iconoclasm and obscurantism, his unapologetic dilettantism and his unabashed socializing within the highest social circles of the creative world he judges in print. It’s a fall from grace that represents the kind of Times-writer morality tale alumni of the paper know all too well. At the height of his career, Mr. Muschamp’s writing was the talk of the New York cultural scene; today, his professional conflicts of interest and very public breakdowns have pushed him to the margins of architectural society.”

It’s been a busy year for Peter Maxwell Davies, the septuagenarian Scottish composer named earlier this year as Master of the Queen’s Music. At an age when many composers are content to bask in their legacy, Maxwell Davies is composing ten string quartets, keeping up his lifelong interest in left-wing politics, and writing children’s music for a festival he helped to found. “Davies himself sees no problems in fecundity. He has always been that sort of composer, and age has not slowed him. Indeed, like Mozart before him, he could almost be described as accelerating towards oblivion.”