Category: people

“In many ways [he was] the last of the generation of French intellectuals that emerged from the new possibilities opened up after the events of May ’68. While not as famous (or infamous) as Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard and Derrida, Virilio leaves us with a body of work that seems to grow in importance in the 21st century as we deal with the ‘pace of change’ in technology and international politics.”

Geoffrey Owens, who had a recurring role on The Cosby Show in the ’80s and ’90s, was photographed last month bagging groceries, a between-gigs job he took to make ends meet; the pictures ended up on Fox News and The Daily Mail Online. Owens actually got an outpouring of support (Fox and the Mail got the shaming) — and then producers, reminded of his existence, started offering him jobs. He tells Sopan Deb what’s happened since and what else he’s been doing (like teaching Shakespearean acting).

When stars’ comings and goings began to be documented on a minute-by-minute basis, those changes triggered celebrity reticence. On its own, that wouldn’t signal the death knell of celebrity journalism as it’s been practiced for decades. But the pressure being applied to celebrity journalism from the top might pale in comparison to the threat surging from below, where a new generation of celebrities — YouTube stars, SoundCloud rappers, and various other earnest young people — share extensively on social media on their own terms, moving quickly and decisively (and messily) with no need for the patience and pushback they might encounter in an interview setting.

“Over the course of a career that spanned more than 50 years, Venturi mounted a sustained counterattack on the high seriousness of modernism, praising the vernacular, the commercial, and even the avowedly ordinary in writings and buildings that he often produced in collaboration with his wife, Denise Scott Brown.” Famously, he responded to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s pronouncement “Less is more” with the quip, “Less is a bore.”

“Brătescu’s work has for years been a powerful influence on artists in the Romanian contemporary art scene, but it wasn’t until the past few years that she achieved fame outside Eastern Europe … [Her] output took the form of films, collages, photographs, installations, travel journals, drawings, and more over the course of her seven-decade career. Her primary interests included the body and the relationship between art and life, and her work often tackled these themes with a dry sense of humor.”

Mr. Mitchell, who described himself as the Jackie Robinson of the ballet world, was hired by choreographer George Balanchine in 1955 to perform with the New York City Ballet and won over audiences and critics with his technical brilliance and charisma. Still, in an era when segregation was just beginning to crumble, his ascent to the upper echelon of dance met with many obstacles, from instructors who encouraged him to abandon ballet and take up other dance genres to shocked theatergoers who wrote letters expressing outrage about Mr. Mitchell being paired onstage with a white woman.

“DiChiera was small of stature and surprisingly soft-spoken for a man who came to have such an enormous impact on Detroit’s cultural landscape. Indeed, the word people used most often to describe him was ‘kind,’ followed quickly by more grandiose words like ‘visionary,’ ‘groundbreaker’ and ‘risk-taker.’ He was all that and more.”

“It is difficult to overstate the many ways in which Michelson contributed to both the film and the art worlds. She was among the first to teach at New York University’s Cinema Studies department, which was among the first of its kind in the United States. And, with Rosalind Krauss, in 1976, she cofounded the journal October, which spurred on a widespread interest in critical theory — in particular the writings of French post-structuralists like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida — within the New York art world of the 1970s and ’80s.”

“A master psychologist, keen strategist and possessor of an enviable deadpan and a string of handy aliases, Mr. Abel had an almost unrivaled ability to divine exactly what a harried news media wanted to hear and then give it to them, irresistibly gift-wrapped. … He was, the news media conceded with a kind of irritated admiration, an American original in the mold of P. T. Barnum, a role model whom Mr. Abel reverently acknowledged.”