Category: people

“He was not one of the notorious titans of the orchestra pit: there was no controversial wartime past; there were no stories of sudden rages, or reclusive obsessions of the sort that made some conductors infamous even to people who never heard them perform. There was just a much-respected man, with a determined character, fine musical judgment and commitment to his work.”

“Hard-living, cop-dodging New York collage artist, photographer, and graffiti writer Dash Snow has died of a drug overdose at 27.” According to his grandmother, art collector Christophe de Menil, Snow had been in rehab this spring and had only recently slipped back into heroin use.

“Robert Korda, a violinist who played with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for nearly 20 years, was found dead Sunday by the Los Angeles Police Department after he was reported missing by his family on Wednesday.”

“Prince Charles quit as patron of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which William Morris founded in 1877, after it rejected a foreword he had written for a handbook on the restoration of old houses.”

Sarris, “who in June experienced a sort of slow-motion layoff at The New York Observer for which he had written reviews since 1989, is one of the last refugees of the heroic age of film criticism.”

Shepard Fairey was in Boston Municipal Court on Friday. His attorney Jeffrey Wiesner says they are finishing details of the agreement with prosecutors, but says Fairey will plead guilty to some of the 13 vandalism charges.

“Although other people have played supporting roles in making Chicago fine arts radio station WFMT-FM a unique broadcast outlet that is respected around the world, one man saw to it that 98.7 FM would remain to this day an oasis of class, style and intelligence amid the rock-and-yak-dominated dial of commercial radio.”

“A major exhibition of letters and paintings by the artist Vincent van Gogh will go on show at the Royal Academy of Art early next year. … Curator Ann Dumas hopes they will show a more balanced view of the artist, who is often regarded as an eccentric genius.”

“[He] emerged as the leading light of India’s first post-colonial generation of Modernists. In 2005 his 1997 painting Mahisasura, an image of the Hindu buffalo-demon defeated by the goddess Durga, sold at Christie’s New York for $1.58 million, the highest price ever paid for the work of a living Indian artist. … His death was reported on the front pages of newspapers across India.”

“Vassily Aksyonov, one of many former Soviet citizens to take up residence in the Washington area since the 1970s, lived among us for 24 years. … You’ve probably never heard of him. Yet his death Monday in Moscow at 76 will set off days of mourning in Russia, where our former neighbor was a superstar. Literarily, he played the role of a Russian Kurt Vonnegut, but Vonnegut would have envied Aksyonov’s stature in his homeland — closer to Tiger Woods’s or even Michael Jackson’s.”