Category: people

“He and his father-in-law, Ralph Ogden, owners of a business that manufactured metal fasteners for construction and home use …, co-founded [the center] in Mountainville, N.Y., and developed it into a prestigious outdoor sculpture museum with modern and contemporary works arrayed over a vast pastoral landscape.”

“While Mr. Clark’s musicianship and technical abilities were sometimes overlooked by critics who saw only the hayseed star of Hee Haw, he said he had few regrets about his career path. … “I’ve seen too many great guitar players sitting unnoticed on a stool in an orchestra. I said, do I want to be there, playing great and nobody knows it, or do I want to be out front with the lights on me, giggling and laughing, playing guitar and rolling my eyes and they say ‘Golly, this guy’s great?'”

“In one of journalism’s most challenging jobs, Mr. Lehmann-Haupt was The Times‘s senior daily book critic from 1969 to 1995 … Readers and colleagues called him a judicious, authoritative voice on fiction and a seemingly boundless array of history, biography, current events and other topics, with forays into Persian archaeology and fly fishing.”

Late in life, he opened an English bookstore in Avignon; before that, in London, he wrote anti-consumerism and anti-automobile books. But he made his biggest mark in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1950s and ’60s: he briefly ran the Off-Off-Broadway birthplace Caffe Cino, and he devised a kit that lets customers assemble their own harpsichords, enabling the modern revival and spread of the instrument.

Dmitry Rybolovlev faces charges of “trading in passive influence and violation of the secrecy of the investigation” as part of what Le Monde has described as “a vast influence-peddling scandal at the heart of Monaco institutions.” The billionaire — who in 2004 bought Donald Trump’s Palm Beach mansion sight unseen at an inflated price — is suing art dealer Yves Bouvier, and he is accused of getting Monaco’s former justice minister to influence the case.

He has been anointed—and travestied—as the ideal of the modern artist, even by those for whom art, modern or otherwise, is at best a diversion and at worst a scam. Everybody knows about the cutting of his ear, or cracks cruel jokes about it. His name is as famous as that of Picasso, but Picasso has been mythologized as a monster of control, whereas van Gogh, it is agreed, lay at the mercy of the uncontrollable.

Fran Lebowitz: “When you walked in, there was a metal door. After that door opened, there was another metal door. On it, handwritten on a piece of paper torn from a legal pad, was a note that read, ‘Knock loudly and announce yourself.’ I knocked, and someone said, ‘Who’s there?’ I said, ‘Valerie Solanas.’ And Andy opened the door.”

“[He] began his musical career as an accordion player and as an accompanist to the renowned French chanteuse Edith Piaf. He was primarily a songwriter before being introduced to filmmaker Claude Lelouch, who invited Mr. Lai to compose a score for A Man and a Woman — and for another 35 films on which they worked together.” In the U.S., his best-known work by far is the music for the 1970 Ryan O’Neal-Ali MacGraw movie Love Story.

Warhol didn’t make a mark on American culture. He became the instrument with which American culture designated itself. He was sincere. He could get away with practically anything because practically nobody believed in his sincerity: people haplessly projected cynicism onto his forthright will to surprise and beguile. The secret to his majesty is that he was a square citizen, untroubled by ambivalence and having no use for irony.