Category: people

Artist Tracey Emin, fresh from being attacked in the press over a dispute about a quilt with a class of 8-year-olds, strikes back at the press: “That’s an invasion of my privacy. If I muck up, I’m going to be one of the first people to say. I don’t need a paper to write lies about me, to say that I’ve done something that I haven’t done.”

Senator John Kerry’s biggest source of income after his Senate salary last year was the sale of a Dutch master painting. Kerry’s wife Teresa Heinz Kerry and her first husband, the late Senator John Heinz, “were famous art collectors, specializing in 17th-century Dutch works, primarily still lifes. Kerry, too, has become quite knowledgeable about art during his second marriage. ‘He’s fairly intellectual,’ one dealer noted, admiringly.”

“British writer Ian McEwan was ‘erroneously’ prevented from entering the United States on March 30 at the Vancouver, B.C., international airport and has received an ‘extremely rare’ letter of apology from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.”

Conductor Kent Nagano is suddenly the man of the moment. “Nagano, 52, was in the news last month when the Montreal Symphony Orchestra put an end to weeks of rumors and officially announced that he would become the orchestra’s music director starting with the 2006-07 season. In February, the Bavarian State Opera named him to succeed Zubin Mehta as general music director, also beginning in 2006-07. He is currently music director of the Los Angeles Opera, Berlin’s Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester and the Berkeley (Calif.) Symphony Orchestra, a post he has held for more than 25 years.”

French police are releasing their files on Pablo Picasso. “Documents show that Picasso was spied on initially as a suspected anarchist, and later over his communist sympathies – before he became a prominent member of France’s Communist Party.”

“The Smithsonian American Art Museum will announce today that New Yorker Kara Walker has won its annual Lucelia Artist Award, worth $25,000. Walker, one of the country’s most prominent African American artists, is best known for taking the genteel medium of the Enlightenment silhouette and enlarging it to wall size, then using it to convey surreal images of the antebellum South.” The result is frequently shocking and controversial imagery conveyed in the normally soothing medium of silhouette, making Walker’s art a fascinating reflection of America’s shadowy history of race relations.

At the age of 88, Arthur Miller is still cranking out work. He’s got two plays in production, and a very busy schedule. “I still love the form. It’s a great, great human adventure. Imagine having a human being stand up on a platform and mesmerize an audience and sometimes even illuminate something for them. You don’t need machinery. It’s a very primitive art. That’s the beauty of it.”

In times of political upheaval, many people take refuge in music, and in South Africa, an entire musical movement has grown out of the nation’s first tumultuous decade following the end of apartheid. The music is called kwaito, and its biggest star is a man known as Zola, who personifies all the anger, confusion, and hope of the impoverished black township residents who are wondering whatever happened to the promises of post-apartheid prosperity.

The US Postal Service has honored Henry Mancini with a postage stamp. “Formal first day of issue ceremonies for the 37-cent stamp were held in Los Angeles. The stamp will be available nationwide Wednesday. Mancini is known for his television theme songs and movie scores. He composed “Moon River” for the film “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” as well as the themes for “Peter Gunn” and “Days of Wine and Roses.”

Kit Armstrong is 12 years old, the youngest student at the prestigious Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. He’s also, according to his teachers, a musical genius of the kind that comes along once in a lifetime. “Have you heard about this kid named Kit Armstrong?” is the question of the moment in the small international community of impresarios who decide which artists land recitals in leading venues and perform with orchestras. His name is already circulating in the wider entertainment industry. He’s been on David Letterman, and handlers are busy fielding his many media requests.”