Category: people

The article “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” – which argued quite clearly against the canon as well as against male-dominated notions of greatness – “would have been enough to secure her place as one of art history’s most important writers, but over the course of her six-decade career, she also made formidable contributions to the study of Realism and Gustav Courbet, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and numerous contemporary artists.”

Chiang was an educator, an activist, and a poet. “Chiang’s poetry — sometimes serene, sometimes angry and sometimes written in all lowercase letters — reflected her anxieties as a first-generation Chinese-American, her desire to etch Asian culture into American society, her involvement with organizations in Chinatown and on the Lower East Side, and her multiple reckonings with breast cancer over nearly a quarter-century.”

By the age of fifty, Mark Twain had achieved something he had dreamed of and worked for his entire life: he was rich. Raised in genteel poverty in small towns in Missouri (when Missouri was still the West), Twain as a grown man, had rubbed elbows with the greatest business tycoons of the time. And now, as head of his own publishing firm, making money for other authors, he felt like a great philanthropist. He could see himself as one of the true benefactors of the age. And it was an age he had named when he chose the title of one of his own best sellers: The Gilded Age.

“In honor of American composer Ned Rorem’s … 94th birthday on October 23, spend seven minutes with the very opinionated Mr. R. This piece was originally made for Studio 360 as part of a Fishko Files-curated series on living composers’ connections to music history.” (audio)

On that long August afternoon a little more than two years ago, Oliver completed his notes for the book he knew he would not see. He titled it “The River of Consciousness” — the title of one of the 10 essays — and dedicated it to his longtime friend and editor at The New York Review of Books, Bob Silvers. He wrote a letter to Mr. Silvers to share this news, and within days, he received a tender letter back. (Mr. Silvers died this year.) With that, I think he felt he had done everything he could.

“Thirty-eight letters, written between 2005 and 2010 by the To Kill a Mockingbird author to her friend Felice Itzkoff, are up for auction this week. Addressed affectionately to ‘Clipper’, Lee’s nickname for Itzkoff, the letters span Lee’s memories of her father, her apparent atheism and her friendship with Hollywood figures. … [There’s also] a suggestion made by American president Lyndon B Johnson to the actor Gregory Peck that the US would one day have a black, female president.”

“For decades, Knight Landesman, 67, had been a pillar of the international art scene, a man-about-town known from the galleries of Manhattan to the Art Basel fair in Switzerland for his primary-colored suits and deep connections in the industry. The brother of the renowned Broadway producer Rocco Landesman, who once served as the head of the National Endowment for the Arts, he started at Artforum in the 1980s and until Wednesday had run the magazine with his three co-publishers, Anthony Korner, Charles Guarino and Danielle McConnell.”

Throughout the 1950s and early ’60s, he sold up to 70 million records, including such well-remembered hits as “Blueberry Hill”, “I’m Walkin'”, and “Red Sails in the Sunset”. Even as late as the mid-’70s, he had been outsold by only The Beatles and Elvis Presley, who insisted that Domino was the better rock ‘n’ roll singer.

“For my offenses against some of my colleagues in the past I offer a shaken apology and ask for their forgiveness,” Wieseltier said in a statement. “The women with whom I worked are smart and good people. I am ashamed to know that I made any of them feel demeaned and disrespected. I assure them that I will not waste this reckoning.”

The news of a shift in leadership, which will take place on October 31, comes days after a lawsuit was filed by the sons of Norman Rockwell and other plaintiffs, seeking to halt the museum’s controversial plan to sell off 40 works at Sotheby’s in order to build its endowment, fund renovations, and pursue a “New Vision” marked by a greater focus on science and technology-driven exhibitions.