Category: people

“Believing that collectors should acquire art being produced in their own time and then hold on to it, giving the public access but never selling, Mr. Neuberger accumulated hundreds of paintings and sculptures by Milton Avery, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and others, becoming one of America’s leading art patrons.”

Just two miles from Norman Rockwell’s much-visited home/museum, forlorn and deteriorating, sits “Chesterwood, the 122-acre summer home of … the American sculptor who created, among countless other monumental works, the statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.”

“Through his eponymous choir, Alldis was responsible for introducing the British public to some of the more eclectic contemporary music of the last century; he also worked with Pink Floyd and Duke Ellington, established a permanent chorus for the London Symphony Orchestra and wrote pantomime music.”

“Here is a powerful argument for writers’ burning their papers … The book turns out to be a wonderful fraud on the order of the Duke and the Dauphin in their Shakespearean romp, and bravo to Samuel Clemens, still able to catch the public’s attention a century after he expired.”

“Jailed filmmaker Jafar Panahi accused Iranian authorities of ‘kidnapping’ Iranian artists to intimidate them, according to a transcript of his trial plea published in France Tuesday.”

“The musical Renaissance man has had, by his own accounting, seven often-simultaneous careers…”

“Over the past year, the teen icon’s popularity has become inescapable. At the time of writing, his video for Baby, the most popular clip on YouTube in 2010, has been viewed more than 1.3 million times per day since it was first uploaded on Feb. 11. Last week, Facebook named him the sixth-biggest “trend” of 2010.”

A Tehran court ruled that the internationally known director of The White Balloon and The Circle must spend six years behind bars and may not make films or travel abroad for 20 years. The crime: working on a film about Iran’s last election and the protests that followed.

“The biggest misapprehension about Sondheim – that he puts intellect above feeling, as if the two aren’t connected – rests, as he sees it, on a wrong-headed understanding of art; that it is driven by something imprecise and mystical, rather than hard, fast rules.”

“To the end of his life he remained a master of cante jondo (‘deep song’), the most traditional of the traditional flamenco styles. … [Yet he] often fused the genre with an unorthodox spate of musical styles, including jazz, rock, classical, Afro-Cuban, American popular song and Bulgarian a cappella.”