Category: people

“I fell in love with the audience tap dancing downstage right [at age 4]. … I said in my head, ‘I can’t get in trouble up here. I can do whatever I want, and the audience will still smile at me.'”

“Activist artist Ai Weiwei said he does not intend to pay $1.1-million demanded by Beijing tax officials after he lost a final appeal in the case on Thursday.”

“One of the things Kael’s writing implies is that the intensity of the moviegoing experience–sitting in a dark, cave-like space, not unlike the inside of your head when your eyes are shut, yet surrounded by strangers whose presence heightens your own reactions–restores you to yourself and can be the source of not just cultural knowledge but self-knowledge.”

“Williams’ plaintive tenor, boyish features and easy demeanor helped him outlast many of the rock stars who had displaced him and such fellow crooners as Frank Sinatra and Perry Como. He remained on the charts into the 1970s, and continued to perform in his 80s at the Moon River Theatre he built in Branson, Mo.”

“Michael Stanley, director of the gallery Modern Art Oxford and a 2012 Turner prize judge who was seen as a rising star in his field, has died aged 37. Stanley, married with three young children, was found dead in a garden on Friday. Police have said they are not treating his death as suspicious.”

“John Keats, … a devotee of aesthetic isolation who swooned at the thought of his so-called ‘bright star’ Fanny Brawne and succumbed to TB when he was 25, was an opium addict. The claim is made in a new biography, to be published on Monday, by Prof Nicholas Roe.”

“The Toronto-born entrepreneur played a key role in cementing the country’s artistic identity, efforts that led many to consider him the godfather of Canada’s music industry.”

Since 2002, Reynold Levy has overseen a massive renovation and redesign of the arts complex’s campus, the raising of $1.3 billion in contributions, developed several new sources of earned income, and maintained (mostly) good relations among Lincoln Center’s 11 contentious resident organizations.

“For a few years I did feel I was on a psychic treadmill, trying to keep up with where I was. Everything changed so rapidly, so strangely. I knew no one who’d ever been in the public eye. I didn’t know anyone – anyone – to whom I could turn and say, “what do you do?”, so it was incredibly disorienting.”

“The marriage between institution and artist is unlikely. Ruscha is famed for his scrupulously laconic hymns to US culture at its most downbeat and vernacular. … The Kunsthistorisches, on the other hand, is a high monument to Old World culture, a cupola-crowned palace built in 1891.”