Category: people

Robert Rainwater, Influential Curator Of New York Public Library’s Art Holdings, Dead At 75

“Throughout his 37-year career at the library — including two decades as the first chief librarian of the Wallach Division, which combined the library’s vast holdings in art, prints and photographs — Mr. Rainwater … oversaw a vast expansion of the [library’s] holdings in modern and contemporary prints, artist-made books and printed ephemera from the 1970s onward.” — New York Times

Albert Einstein’s ‘God Letter’ Sells For $3 Million At Auction

“The one-and-a-half-page letter, written in 1954 in German and addressed to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, contains reflections on God, the Bible and Judaism. Einstein says: ‘The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.'” (Even so, Einstein maintained that he was not an atheist.) — The Guardian

Actor Philip Bosco Dead At 88

While he appeared in roughly a dozen films (including Working Girl, Children of a Lesser God, Three Men and a Baby, and The First Wives Club) and guest-starred on many a television series, his great love was live theatre: he acted in 50 productions on Broadway alone and garnered six Tony nominations, winning in 1989 for Lend Me a Tenor. — Hollywood Reporter

John Waters Talks About Film, Art, And His Careers In Each

“I’m always trying to question those two businesses, art and film, in a way that’s celebrating the mistakes, and what goes wrong, and insider knowledge. … I would say that still many people who know my films have absolutely no idea that I have an art career. And I kept that very separate on purpose, because … celebrity is the only obscenity left in the art world, and it is the one thing I will always have to fight.” — The Believer

While AIDS Ravaged The Arts World In The 1980s, The New York Times Obituaries Euphemized

“Like most obituaries, these carried the weight of individual lives, many taken too soon. But unlike other obits, they were laced with evasions — omissions effectively erasing a person’s life, effectively erasing AIDS. … Those who lost their lives — many of them pathbreaking artists and individuals who, if still here today, would be running our museums, our publishing houses, our media companies, opera houses, and drama guilds — died before we had enough to remember them by. To trace the stories behind such obituaries is to unearth the very voices that shaped our culture, to recover what’s been lost.” — Slate