Alison Gopnik: “Turning 50 and becoming bisexual and Buddhist did seem far too predictable – a sort of Berkeley bat mitzvah, a standard rite of passage for aging Jewish academic women in Northern California.” Then she discovered David Hume.
Category: people
2015’s 50 Most Influential Arts People?
“It is not meant to be a popularity contest, nor does it necessarily purport to identify the best, most talented, most capable leaders. Power and influence (and the perception of where power and influence lie) are their own exclusive criteria for this list – and that is often, if not always, a judgment call.”
Russia Wants Rachmaninoff’s Body Back (Test: Do You Know Where It Is Now?)
Russian cultural minister Vladimir Medinsky claimed that Americans have neglected the composer’s grave while attempting to “shamelessly privatize” his name. But Rachmaninoff’s descendants have balked at the idea of moving the body, pointing out that he died in the U.S. after spending decades outside of Russia in self-imposed political exile.
Unusual Fight Over Long-Dead Author’s Property
“Pascal Dufour, a lawyer whose family business goes back five generations, is being prosecuted for trying to sell the original manuscript of one of France’s best-known books, the Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb by Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand (1768-1848).”
Mitsuko Uchida, Sylvie Guillem, Dominique Perrault, Tadanori Yokoo, Wolfgang Laib Win Japan’s $124,000 Praemium Imperiale
“Established in 1989, the Praemium Imperiale recognizes achievements in five cultural categories: architecture, painting, sculpture, music and theater/film.”
How One Of The 20th Century’s Great Public Intellectuals Saw The World
“Willis, who died of lung cancer in 2006 at sixty-four, was one of the great public intellectuals of her generation. Read the latest anthology of her work, The Essential Ellen Willis (2014)—the posthumous anthology that won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism this year—and you will see that she was virtually incapable of writing a poor sentence or conceiving an unsurprising insight. Her rigor was unmatched, her fearlessness an inspiration. In every piece, wit lilted like an aria over a basso continuo of moral seriousness.”
Bestselling Author Commits Suicide One Day Before Release Of New Book
The death of Dutch novelist and columnist Joost Zwagerman, 51, “emerged on Tuesday evening when he failed to turn up for a radio interview to talk about his new book De stilte van het licht (The Silence of Light). Much of the music he had chosen for the programme was about death.”
John Perrault, 78, Art Critic, Artist, Poet (And ArtsJournal Blogger)
“Perreault is best-known for being an early proponent of avant-garde movements like Minimalism, Land art, and Pattern and Decoration during the late 1960s and the ’70s. … He also had an eye for artists who would ultimately become canonical. As a result, he achieved a following from artists, critics, curators, and readers of all kinds.”
The Man Who Fronted The Weirdest (And Longest-Running) Show On Spanish-Language TV Is A Mild-Mannered German-Jewish Chilean
“Sábado Gigante‘s Don Francisco is really Mario Kreutzberger, the 74-year-old child of refugees whose German-Jewish parents fled the holocaust to Chile, where Mario was born. He started hosting the variety show there when he was 21, in 1962. As Sábado Gigante comes to an end on September 19, Kreutzberger talks to Brooke about bringing the show to the US, his 53-year-long career, and criticism of the show’s tone.” (audio)
When Black Artists Speak Out (A History)
“There’s a sense that prominent black voices are always sending dispatches from within the storm. Simone’s performance seems to capture a woman standing on the edge of it. Hill is a performer gently trying to come out of it, while Chappelle is a man shocked to find himself still right in its eye. By contrast, West is the storm itself.”