Category: people

A network of latter-day surrealophiles is objecting to the impending sale of surrealist Andre Breton’s collections at auction. “While the collection will be preserved on a CD-ROM, the signers of the petition insist that the contents of Breton’s jumbled anti-museum make sense “together and only together.” They call upon France to establish a permanent place to house this collection which, represents ‘the history of a powerful mind, whose creativity, imagination, and moral indignation” were directed toward “the singular possibility of changing life and transforming the world according to the life-affirming movement of desire.”

Is Simon Russell Beale the best English actor of his generation? “Ask London theatergoers, critics and his fellow actors, and they will say that he is the finest stage actor of his generation. (He turns 42 next Sunday). In role after role, he has shown a virtuosic range with a depth of feeling that few actors can match, playing kings and common men, Restoration fops and Shakespearean clowns, characters from Chekhov and Ibsen, and even singing in the Leonard Bernstein musical Candide.”

This week Brent Glass took over as director of “the third most popular museum in the world – the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. It is not an altogether happy place. But in his 55 years, Glass has developed a well-honed vision of what history is and what that museum can be.”

A new exhibit at a private estate in Florida is providing a unique look into the process and development of one of the world’s best-known and most controversial artists. Christo, the large-scale installation artist who is reportedly in talks to mount a massive work in New York’s Central Park, may be best-known for wrapping the Reichstag, but he and his collaborator insist that they are neither one-trick ponies nor cultural commentators. They believe in letting art just be art, even if their work occasionally causes political firestorms.

The debate over who wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare has spawned a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists, with Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Queen Elizabeth I all contenders as the ultimate pretender. But some Shakespeare devotees think there’s some pretty shoddy detective work behind the drive to discredit the Bard. “For example, elaborate scenarios have to be concocted for the lives of Marlowe, Rutland, Oxford, and Elizabeth I because they all died many years before the final play was written.”

Susan Trapnell, who came to Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theatre a year ago as managing director, has quit the theatre, citing personal reasons. “By the time the announcement was made Tuesday, Trapnell already had returned to Seattle, where she was executive director of the Seattle Arts Commission and managing director of the nonprofit playhouse A Contemporary Theatre.”

Cartoonist-and-so-much-more Art Spiegelman is leaving The New Yorker, as he has several times before, citing differences with the direction the venerable magazine has taken since 9/11. Spiegelman, who has never hesitated to express unpopular ideas in his work, praises editor David Remnick, but says that “the place I’m coming from is just much more agitated than The New Yorker’s tone. The assumptions and attitudes [I have] are not part of The Times Op-Ed page of acceptable discourse.”

Harry Potter may not measure up to Lord of the Rings on the big screen, but J.R.R. Tolkien isn’t alive to rake in the residuals, and J.K. Rowling is, with the consequence that Rowling is now officially the highest-paid woman in the U.K. (And the Brits count Madonna as one of theirs, so you know we’re talking serious money!) Rowling, who was last seen trying to stall for more time to finish the latest Potter installment by auctioning off an index card, reportedly made $77 million in 2002.

When Brazil’s new government takes office on Wednesday, its culture portfolio will be held by one of the country’s biggest pop stars for the last 35 years, the singer-songwriter and guitarist Gilberto Gil.” The appointment, to say the least, is controversial. “The challenger of the establishment will now experience things from the other side.”

Here’s the AP’s list of A&E notables who passed away in 2002.