Category: people

“Early on he adopted a tactile, chance-driven method of painting that privileged almost every technique over brushwork. Dribbling paint Pollock-like onto loose canvasses, he allowed it to roll, pool and bleed, and he sometimes kneaded and hauled on the canvas … The billowy, undulating results could look like psychedelic landscapes or … ‘Abstract Expressionist rococo’.”

“She was schooled in the Russian tradition, but was not of Russia; indeed, her increasing commitment to the chamber music repertoire, her unremitting search for musical truth, and the broad brush of her pianism were unmistakably French.”

“Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don’t want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.”

“In February, on the 50th anniversary of the building’s competition, Mr. Kallmann responded to its many critics. ‘It had to be awesome, not just pleasant and slick,’ he told The Boston Globe. Great buildings, he said, should ‘remind you of ancient memories, history.’

“‘It’s not a department store. It’s not an office building. Come on.'”

“Three other simple-looking works … could be confounding or funny, depending on your point of view, or elicit an ‘I could have done that.’ To which Daderko would respond, ‘Maybe. But would you have been able to ‘think’ it?’ It’s the conceptual aspects of readymades that fascinate him.”

Artist Sarah Sze: “I am aware people might dismiss my art, but I’m interested in getting them to stop and look. … The pieces in this show appear to measure space, or time, and now that I have two children, time is more significant. It has more weight.”

“‘Engineering came first but now, after 30 years, I don’t see any difference between architecture and engineering. If you look at Brunel’s [Clifton Suspension] bridge in Bristol you could ask, “Is that architecture or engineering?” The details are architecture but the solution is engineering.'”

“Ms. Sereny’s books were as much psychological studies as historical ones. As her work made plain, she was interested less in plumbing the ‘what’ of history’s evil deeds than she was in the ‘why’ of their perpetrators. Few people if any, she often said, were born evil; instead, she argued, they were made that way by traumatic conditions that could generally be located in childhood. What interested her above all was conscience.”

“Sorkin would never, Franzen-like, claim to be part of a “high-art literary tradition.” If he aspires to belong to any literary tradition at all, it would seem to be the tradition of the Broadway musical, the most middlebrow genre there is. Seriously: In his new show, The Newsroom, Sorkin goes out of his way to mention a famous musical in every episode.”

“He dealt with things like homosexuality, and religious bigotry, racism, abortion… What he did that was groundbreaking back then, is still kind of groundbreaking today.”