Category: people

The Museum of Modern Art has appointed John Elderfield as the museum’s new chief curator of the department of painting and sculpture. Elderfield “succeeds Kirk Varnedoe, who organized “Matisse Picasso” with him, in what is generally recognized as the most significant curatorial post in modern art. It was first held by Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum’s visionary founding director.”

TheSmokingGun.com specializes in unearthing incriminating documents about celebrities. The site’s latest revelation brings to light graphic testimony, previously sealed and unavailable to the public, from the statutory rape trial of director Roman Polanski, who is nominated for an Oscar this year. Polanski was accused of sexual contact with a 13-year-old girl, and the trial transcripts “include the girl testifying that the pair’s illicit romps at Hollywood hot shot Jack Nicholson’s house included anal and oral sex.” The new information could derail Polanski’s comeback bid at the Academy Awards, despite the now-39-year-old victim’s insistence that she has forgiven him.

So what’s Garrison Keillor really like? Don’t ask Dave Barry: “I do know that he’s a generous host, and very smart, and he can be funny as hell even when he’s not on the radio. But he’s not an easy guy to get close to.” But Barry says that Keillor is one of the great comic geniuses of the age, and that his ‘Humor Processor’ is always running. Keillor has had his critics in recent days, but how many comics can produce two full hours of original material a week, every week for almost three decades, and perform it live without a hint of the arduousness of the process?

Daniel Libeskind is much-rumored to be a candidate for the dean of architecture job at Columbia University. What are his chances? Not good, if fellow architects Steven Holl and Peter Eisenman have anything to do with it…

A New York judge has dismissed a claim by writer Hector Feliciano, who claimed he should get a “finder’s fee” for helping to locate artwork looted by the Nazis in World War II. Feliciano “created an international sensation with his 1994 book, ‘The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art,’ which focused attention on the missing artworks. He maintained that he was entitled to 17.5 percent of the estimated $39 million value of the paintings, an amount he said was ‘consistent with the standard art recovery fee of the industry’.”

Viennese high society is looking into how to ban millionaire playboy Richard Lugner from the famous annual Opera Ball next year. He outraged organizers this year by inviting Pamela Anderson and “turning the ball into a cheap PR stunt.” “Lugner makes few pretensions to join the elite social set that wants him ousted from the ball, the highlight of the city’s social calendar. His packed-out press conferences usually revolve around discussions about the ‘great breasts’ of the women he plans to invite.”

As the play adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” comes to the United States after disappointing reviews in London, Rushdie describes life after the fatwa. “In these post-fatwa days, he said, he has an ordinary life. He doesn’t need to say that it’s ordinary, only compared with his years in hiding.”

Country singer George Jones, Motown legend Smokey Robinson, Florence Knoll Bassett, the designer and architect; Trisha Brown, the dancer and choreographer; Philippe de Montebello, the art historian and director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Uta Hagen, the actor and teacher; Lawrence Halprin, the landscape architect; the late Al Hirschfeld, the artist and show business caricaturist; and Ming Cho Lee, the set designer and educator.

Twenty years ago this week, French-Canadian composer Claude Vivier was murdered in Paris by a teenage prostitute. “His grisly demise was the mirror opposite of his music, which often sparkles with a delicate and loving grandeur. And it endures. Most of his 48 completed pieces have been recorded… His output heightened Canada’s international stature more than any other composer’s. Dangerous living fuelled his inspiration, helping polish salacious experience into a diamond in sound. Yet it also proved his undoing.”

Nina and Daniel Libeskind are a power couple. “The couple, who invite constant comparison to characters from Mike Myers’ ‘Sprockets’ routine, do not look like the shark-suited developers or heavy-lidded bureaucrats who have dominated the downtown-redevelopment story. But in the decade or so since Daniel, the distinguished professor, and Nina, who shares a starring role in Studio Daniel Libeskind as the driving force of its business side, have been designing actual buildings rather than promoting architectural education, they have become a political force to be reckoned with.”