Category: people

Poet Dana Gioia is awaiting confirmation as new chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. “Born in the Los Angeles suburb of Hawthorne, Gioia is the son (and oldest of four children) of an Italian father who was a cabdriver and kids shoe store owner, and a Mexican mother who worked as a telephone company operator. Gioia was the first member of his family to attend college, receiving a B.A. from Stanford University.” He won’t say much now about arts policy before he’s confirmed by the US Senate. But: “It’s a cliché to say art should be provocative, just as it’s a falsehood to say that art should not be provocative.”

Given the current belt-tightening climate, director of the UK’s National Gallery is hardly the plum position it ought to be. And Charles Saumarez Smith is under tremendous pressure not only to preserve the institution itself, but to match the success of his predecessor, the legendary Neil MacGregor. On top of that, the Getty Museum in L.A. recently swiped a priceless Raphael right out from under the National’s nose. What’s a director to do?

The struggle of American conductors to be taken seriously in America is well-documented, but what about British-born maestros looking for work at home? Meet Donald Runnicles: orchestras and critics in Europe and North America rave about him, and yet few British orchestras have ever worked under him. A crash course may be in order, however, as Runnicles is widely rumored to be a finalist to succeed Leonard Slatkin at the head of the BBC Symphony.

Historian Michael Bellesiles has been vilified by the political right, ostracized by his colleagues, and forced out of his professorship since charges of falsified research in his controversial book on America’s “gun culture” hit the front pages several months back. Now, Columbia University is stripping Bellesiles of the prestigious Bancroft Prize it awarded him when the book was originally published. For the record, Bellesiles continues to stand by his research.

Novelist Patricia Cornwell knows who Jack the Ripper was. Or she says she does. Others may disagree, (‘others’ being defined in this case as ‘every criminologist in the UK,’) but Cornwell insists that British painter Walter Sickert can be conclusively linked to the notorious killing spree in late-19th century London through letters and other written material previously dismissed as hoaxes.

The Kennedy Center Honors staged its 25th annual gala Sunday. This year’s honorees are actors Elizabeth Taylor and James Earl Jones, dancer Chita Rivera, singer-songwriter Paul Simon and conductor James Levine.

Just who is Keith Tyson, this year’s Turner Prize winner? For one thing, he’s unfazed by controversy: “The Turner is an important prize precisely because it keeps interest frothing away at the top end. And to ask ‘Is that art?’ is pointless. If you went to a Mercury Music Prize, you wouldn’t say: ‘Is a country-and-western album better than a punk album?’ You wouldn’t ask: ‘Is it music?’ You would just think: ‘It’s not my kind of music.’ What do I feel? How do I respond to it? Is it interesting? Those are the questions to ask.”

Quincy Troupe, who was forced out of his appointment as California’s first Poet Laureate this fall after it was discovered he had misrepresented his credentials on his resume, has had to resign his teaching post at the University of California, San Diego. “I very much regret my lapse in judgment and the problems it has created for my department and the broader UCSD community,” Troupe said.

Troupe told a colleague last week that “he decided to step down after the university decided to suspend him for a year without pay or benefits.” Troupe told reporters that he is a person who faces up to his mistakes, but while some of Troupe’s supporters were angry that the university didn’t stick up for the poet, others seemed relieved that the affair is over. “I am relieved he chose to do the honorable thing by resigning. He’s a great poet, but he needs to be a great poet somewhere else.”

Many writers have penned fiction based on their memories of the Holocaust. But for Hungarian-born writer Imre Kortesz, this year’s Nobel Prizewinner for literature, those memories, and the healing of time passed, have led him to a different view of those horrible days than that shared by many of his contemporaries. Kortesz, who now considers Germany his home, describes the Holocaust not as an assault on Jews by Germany, but as a tragic and catastrophic failure on the part of all of Europe. Germany, says Kortesz, has come to terms with its guilt in a way that many European countries, his native Hungary in particular, have not.