Category: people

British artist Michael Dickinson is to go on trial next week accused of insulting the Turkish Prime Minister’s dignity. Dickinson “was arrested for displaying a poster of his work entitled Good Boy. It shows Recep Tayyip Erdogan – the Turkish Prime Minister – as a dog on a leash made from the American flag.”

Angela Gheorghiu was fired from Chicago Lyric Opera for missing rehearsals. Why was she away? It was a stand-by-your-man thing. Husband Roberto Alagna was singing at the Met Opera. “I asked Lyric Opera to let me go to New York for two days to be with him and they said ‘no.'” She went anyway because, she claims, “I needed to be by Roberto’s side at this very important moment.”

“Hundreds of letters and photographs found stuffed inside in a long-forgotten suitcase have thrown a tragic new light on the secret life of the great Italian composer Giacomo Puccini – and may also reveal a lost operatic composition.”

“Joseph V. Noble, a former director of the Museum of the City of New York who earlier exposed three famous works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as fakes, died last Saturday in West Orange, N.J.”

Tania Head’s dramatic and unsubstantiated tale of surviving the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center brings to mind Lillian Hellman’s self-proclaimed heroism against the Nazis. “Whether from Lillian Hellman’s pen or Tania Head’s mouth, in Europe during World War II or Lower Manhattan in 2001, the mythic power of the stories was the same. Love had given Hellman and Ms. Head the strength to transcend terrors. The similarities do not end there. Neither story has any verifiable link to reality.”

Suave, erudite and faultlessly tailored, Mr. Emmerich presided over an extensive stable of American and European contemporary artists from 1954 to 1998, mounting elegant presentations in his pristine, understated uptown galleries

“Over the next several months, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, among operadom’s most beloved voices, will be singing on what is being billed as her farewell tour. … But Dame Kiri, as she prefers to be called, is having none of it. Reached by phone recently, the exquisitely preserved 63-year-old soprano immediately sets to correcting any impressions that a reporter may have had that this is her goodbye.”

“Lenore Tawney, an artist whose monumental sculptural weavings redefined the possibilities of both sculpture and weaving in the second half of the 20th century and helped create the genre of fiber art, died Monday at her home in Manhattan.”

“Everything he did was designed for the public eye. Whether he was dancing, defecting, duetting with Margot Fonteyn, conducting orchestras when he could dance no more, cruising the boy bars and bath houses or dying of AIDS, Rudolf Nureyev understood as no performing artist had done before him the indivisibility of private and public persona and the ways in which one could be made to serve the other.”

“When Kathy Halbreich announced her resignation as director of Walker Art Center last March, she said she was looking forward to at least ‘one more great professional love affair’ in her career. On Wednesday she was named to a new post as associate director at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.”