Category: people

“I want to be completely legitimate as a singer. I don’t want it to be ‘O.K., couldn’t quite cut it as an opera singer, so he had to do performance art.’ It always bothered me that Laurie Anderson said she wasn’t good enough to be a professional violinist.”

McEvilley’s review of a 1984 MoMA show, and the responses in Artforum, “were the opening salvos in an argument about multiculturalism that would define American art for the rest of the 1980s and ’90s. When the dust had settled, it was clear who the winner was, and it was also clear that a new era in thinking about art had begun.”

John Eliot Gardner: “If I have any religious feelings at all it is thanks to music. I believe very strongly in the synergy that happens when you make music in beautiful historical buildings”

“The winner of 14 Grammy Awards — including one in the early 1980s for producer of the year — Ramone was known for forging close creative relationships with artists and for the sumptuous sounds of his work, which typified an era of lavish recording budgets.”

“Indian film actor Sanjay Dutt will stop fighting his conviction on weapons charges and serve out his term in jail, he announced on Thursday. Last week, India’s Supreme Court rejected the hit actor’s final appeal. He had been convicted of owning an assault rifle supplied by the same gangsters who carried out the Mumbai 1993 bombings.”

“Was she, as depicted in the Four Gospels, the most favoured friend and closest disciple of Jesus Christ, forever graced by being the person he first met after his resurrection? Or was she the fallen woman so brilliantly reconstructed by Pope Gregory in the sixth century as a superb and effective act of misogynist propaganda?”

The actor, “who was fired from the Broadway play Orphans last month after clashing with the director, Daniel Sullivan, and his co-star Alec Baldwin, attended the first preview performance of the play … sitting in the first row on the aisle and leaping to his feet before any other audience member to give a standing ovation at the end.”

“Lhota threatened the museum’s financing from the city, raised the specter of evicting it from its home in Prospect Heights and declared that, when assessing what art should be displayed to the public, the sensibility that really mattered to him was that of his 8-year-old daughter, Kathryn.”

The “upstart venue” hires a fundraiser and manager because “We want to be really solid, and we want to be here forever.”

“I couldn’t write in Vietnam, the rain was too thick, there was no paper, everything got wet. I bought a little Pentax, and I started taking amazing pictures and I really loved the visceral aspect of the thing … And I think that combination of visceral and still cerebral in some way was a beautiful marriage for me. After the war I went back to film school.”