Category: people

Deborah Solomon travels to Lafayette, La. to meet the artist’s sister and learn about his dyslexia and their fundamentalist Christian upbringing, talks to a classmate at Black Mountain College from whom he stole a quilt to use in an early artwork (“The next time I saw it was at the Leo Castelli Gallery”), and has coffee-with-Häagen-Dazs in a Williamsburg loft with Susan Weil, Rauschenberg’s ex-wife and the woman who taught him how to make photograms.

“The idea that art and politics don’t mix, and that silence is therefore perfectly acceptable, is prevalent in Europe and North America, leading to more indulgence towards Dudamel. But this view is based on a profound misunderstanding of the conductor and the program behind him. El Sistema and politics have been mixed since the arrival of Hugo Chávez in power in 1999, and Dudamel’s career and program have been heartily supported by the Bolivarian Revolution. The idea that silence equates to political neutrality is therefore misguided, as many Venezuelans are well aware.”

“In the past few years, entertainers of south Asian origin have gone from being a minor footnote in American popular culture to a headline event. You can see a snapshot of this new America in a picture British-Pakistani actor Riz Ahmed tweeted this month at the Met Gala, the annual gathering of pop-culture royalty.”

An explosive legal battle between one of Hollywood’s best-paid actors and the business managers he fired has laid bare tumultuous finances, outrageous spending and troubling behavior on Disney’s new ‘Pirates’ movie in a case that could even change how the industry does business.

“Nadezhda Mandelstam … [wrote] about the many instances when, confronted with the desperation of their situation, they had asked each other if this was the moment when they, too, could no longer bear to go forward.”

The showman ultimately became a good friend and supporter of his one-time adversary, the founder of the ASPCA – and Barnum taught him some crucial points of public relations, without which the movement might have died.

“New theories about the extent of Shakespeare’s collaborative work appear to chip away at the solitary-genius monolith, but in fact they gain their intellectual and institutional traction from our very investment in that monolith. Adaptations similarly reinforce Shakespeare’s dominance even as they attempt to overwrite his social and linguistic conventions.”

The museum would anchor a “Chuck Berry Cultural District,” to honor Berry, who died in March at age 90, and the area’s African-American heritage.

An attractive young department-store heiress from Denver, Flora divorced the painfully conventional husband she had been pressured to marry at 19 and took off to study art in Paris, where she met and fell in love with the sculptor. If only the story had ended there.

“As an actor-producer [Mat Fraser] has been responsible for such deliberately provocative projects as Thalidomide!! A Musical and the first ‘cripsploitation’ action-movie Kung Fu Flid: Unarmed but Dangerous.” Richard III would seem an ideal role for him, but after he moved to New York and got a role on American Horror Story: Freak Show, he thought it was a role he’d never play: “To be honest I’d begun to feel a bit like yesterday’s cripple. I wasn’t sure if I’d be offered a straight acting role in England again.” (He was.)