Category: people

“Over the last five years [Ben Wood] has transformed himself from a successful Boston architect into a Shanghai powerbroker whose designs translate into billions of dollars in development. The profession’s big players are flocking to China to compete for commissions. Even the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has raved about the opportunities to be had. But Mr. Wood is one of the very few allowed to build whole neighborhoods without a local associate or a government institute to sign the construction documents.”

Jason Rhoades, the controversial pop sculptor who reveled in raunch and seemed to delight in offending middle American sensibilities, has died of heart failure at 41. “Rhoades embedded his three-dimensional blowouts with id, excess, obnoxiousness, rascally ambition and a rampaging life force. His sculpture ran rampant, and as close to amok as he could make it in the 13 jam-packed years of his career.”

Edward Gardner is the UK’s “it” conductor of the moment, having made headlines with a production of John Adams’s controversial Death of Klinghoffer last year, and then winning appointment as principal conductor of the always tumultuous English National Opera. Now, he’s opening the famed Edinburgh Festival with a new production of Strauss’s massive opera, Elektra. “It is a big gig even for a musician whose career, at the moment, seems unstoppable.”

Rebekka Guoleifsdottir’s route from aspiring photographer to rookie success story is yet another lesson (as if one more was needed) in the power of the interconnected world to break down traditional barriers to professional and artistic success. “Just over a year ago the single mother was still teaching herself how to use a camera… She had already put some of her drawings on Flickr, a community website where users post their pictures for others to view, and decided to add some of her early photos.” Twelve months later, she was Flickr’s most viewed member, and “is set to make a fortune by selling her work online.”

The former New York City Ballet dancer was one of the company’s first international stars. “Direct in both her dancing and her views about dance, Ms. Hayden was known for her unmatched blend of individuality and versatility.”

“George Scialabba is an essayist and critic working at Harvard Universit. He writes in what William Hazlitt — the patron saint of generalist essayists — called the ‘the familiar style,’ and he is sometimes disarmingly explicit about the difficulties, even the pain, he experiences in trying to resolve cultural contradictions. That is no way to create the aura of mystery and mastery so crucial for awesome intellectual authority.”

The Seattle Times reports in the third part of its investigation of glass artist Dale Chihuly that the artist protects his work by trying to prevent other artists from copying it.

“Daniel Schmid, one of Switzerland’s best-known film and opera directors, died on Saturday in his hometown, Flims, in eastern Switzerland. He was 64.”

Glass artist Dale Chihuly is a philanthropist involved in many charities. And one of them… reports the Seattle Times… also seems to benefit Chihuly along with 33,000 seniors…

He’s Derek Gillman, 53, “president and chief executive of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, a prestigious art school and museum known for its collection of 19th- and 20th-century American paintings. Trustees at the Barnes cited Mr. Gillman’s experience with complex museum expansion projects, a familiarity crucial to the Barnes as it charts the move of its fabled collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art from suburban Merion to a new building in downtown Philadelphia.”