Category: people

Last week Czeslaw Milosz and Günter Grass traveled to Vilnius Lithuania to unveil a plaque commemorating Joseph Brodsky. – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

New York art dealer Larry Gagosian is “not a discoverer of artists, but rather a cultivator of those on the rise and a seducer of collectors. It is not all about the big deal, he says. It’s fun to sell a big painting, it’s also profitable, I won’t deny that, and I spend a lot of time and energy doing that. But my relationship with the artist is probably the most rewarding, the most difficult part of my profession.” – The Telegraph (UK)

“There was a time when Jay McInerney was the toast of Manhattan. He was compared to Fitzgerald. He posed for pictures with Tama Janowitz and Bret Easton Ellis. He regrets the photographs now. He didn’t need the Brat Pack.” – The Scotsman

Julian Schnabel winters in New York, and summers in the Hamptons. And in between, he makes movies. People were lining up to slam it, but his first film, a bio-pic of the short life of the artist Jean Michel Basquiat, was outrageously well received. His second, Before Night Falls, is about the exiled Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas. It has just taken second prize at the Venice Film Festival. Schnabel is on a roll. – The Independent (UK)

German Chancellor Gerhard Shroeder is about to become a pop star. “Earlier this year Mr Schroeder joked to an autograph hunter ‘Get me a beer or I’ll go on strike!’ as he toured eastern Germany to rally support for his centre-left Social Democrats. But his remark was recorded, and comedian Stefan Raab mixed it into a drinking song called Get Me A Beer!” – BBC

Art critic Robert Hughes will have to face a retrial of his dangerous driving charges from a May 1999 accident. A Western Australian court upheld an appeal to reopen the case. – Yahoo! News (AFP)

Carnegie Hall spends the weekend paying tribute to Isaac Stern, the violinist who became one of the most powerful movers in the music world. – New York Times

New York Magazine film critic John Simon goes for director Atom Egoyan’s jugular at a press conference about Egoyan’s project filming all of the Beckett plays. “I have seen at least 12 productions of this play,” he began, “all more touching than yours. Was this deliberate or just incompetence on your part?” – Salon

Shawn Fanning is the very model of the at-home innovator. “Fanning figured out that if he combined a music-search function with a file-sharing system and, to facilitate communication, instant messaging, he could bypass the rats’ nest of legal and technical problems that kept great music from busting out all over the World Wide Web.” – Time Magazine

Salman Rushdie has moved to New York from London. “London did not spur his imagination. ‘I think it speaks for itself that, for somebody who lived in England for as long as I did, relatively little of my work has dealt with it.’ New York holds more promise. ‘There’s so much stuff just asking me to write it down here,’ he says.” – The Observer (UK)