Category: people

After years of strenuously avoiding any public statement about the ever more dire political situation in his homeland, the star conductor last week gave a strenuously evenhanded plea for both sides to settle their differences – whereupon both sides attacked him. Now, after a young musician was shot while protesting, Dudamel has directly called on “the President of the Republic and the national government to rectify and listen to the voice of the Venezuelan people. … Democracy cannot be built to fit the needs of a particular government or otherwise it would cease to be a democracy.”

“Jordan (Tead) Vaughn, 34, made a reputation for himself in Detroit’s street art scene over the past 20 years. The Trenton-reared artist was known for being able to seamlessly blend various styles to create an approach that was pulled from the early days of graffiti yet uniquely his own.”

By all accounts except the federal government’s, Ruben Van Kempen is a pillar of the community. For 37 years he taught theater in Seattle Public Schools, growing Roosevelt High’s drama program into one of the best in the country.

“You will not mess with my First Amendment, my Bill of Rights, my Declaration of Independence, my Constitution. I underline the ‘my’ in terms of the way I feel about it. That’s the way this country was born, that’s what it’s dedicated to. It has not served up equal justices yet, … but under the law, we are promised equal justice under the law, equal opportunity. So I think that’s as conservative as you can get.”

It is hard to imagine how some of Acconci’s work, which addresses consent as both a theme and a medium, would be received as new work by museum audiences today. (Notwithstanding Acconci’s successful retrospective at MoMA P.S.1 in 2016, his place in the canon by then long established.) Recent examples of socially transgressive artworks suggest that the answer may be: not so well.

It was Russian performance artist Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich, who has pulled this stunt performed this piece several times before. (Yes, he was arrested. And no, he’s not the guy who nailed his scrotum to Red Square.)

It turns out that countries with lots of immigration have historically relied more on nonverbal communication—and thus, people there might smile more.

“This year’s Met Ball—held Monday night and inspired by a Costume Institute exhibition, Art of the In-Between, showcasing the career of avant-garde Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons—was something remarkable in the Annals of the Absurd, an explosion of frippery and shamelessness that recalled late-Weimar or mid-career Mad Hatter in its slavish devotion to peacockery in the face of complex, oftentimes brutal, reality.”

“When [he] slowly fell to his knees during the finale of his star-studded birthday concert, fans and musicians alike thought it was another one of his quirky performance acts.”

“For a time Mr. Khanna was one of India’s most recognizable stars, a darkly handsome screen idol who appeared in more than 100 films, many of them runaway successes.” But he never quite achieved Amitabh Bachchan’s level of superstardom. likely because, at the height of his career, he left Bombay to spend four years at the now-notorious Rajneesh compound in Oregon.