Category: people

Four years ago it looked like Joshua Reynolds was about to make his big breakthrough as a playwright. It didn’t quite work out though, and now, in his new role as a writer about food for the New York Times, Reynolds “finds himself in the literary tradition of Marcel Proust, finding in food the key to the recovery of lost times.” – The Idler

Karlheinz Stockhausen was one of the leading lights of the mid-20th Century avant-garde, and he influenced many composers. “Yet today it is hard to find Stockhausen even on CD, let alone in performance. He has all but disappeared from view. Some of the reasons for this lie at his own door. Stockhausen now releases CDs on his own label, but makes it frustratingly difficult to buy them.” – The Guardian

In France to promote his latest film, director Robert Altman told the French press that he will move to France if George W. Bush is elected president in November. “It would be a catastrophe for the whole world.” – Yahoo! News (Reuters)

“A Dutch doctor will tell a world congress on headache which begins in London today that Pablo Picasso may have experienced bizarre visual migraine auras. Some people who suffer from migraine experience a disconcerting distortion of their vision. When they look at people or objects, they see them split into two parts, usually on the vertical plane. Others say they see just an illusion of a fractured face.” – The Guardian

SO WHAT? Picasso was dismissive of critics who saw his Cubist paintings as philosophical exercises and tried to understand them through “mathematics, trigonometry, chemistry, psychoanalysis and whatnot”. He was even more dismissive of the idea that he was an abstract artist. Picasso’s visual distortions are always poetic. – The Guardian

Nearly 70 years after she died, the remains of prima ballerina Anna Pavlova will be returned to Russia from a cemetery in London. – Philadelphia Inquirer

Arthur Danto is a prominent philosopher as well as art critic for The Nation. “Philosophers, at least in theory, are seekers after truth. Truth, the poet says, is beauty. Thus it makes perfect sense that Danto, who philosophizes by day, should moonlight as one of America’s best-known art critics.” – Boston Globe

Andrew Crispo, a Manhattan art dealer who was “acquitted in a 1980s sex-torture case was sentenced to seven years in prison on Wednesday for threatening to kidnap a lawyer’s daughter in an attempt to get money from a bankruptcy trustee.” – Yahoo! (Reuters)

Nearly 30 years after his composing debut, Steve Reich’s music still receives tumultuous receptions wherever its performed, splitting audiences between those who hear genius and others who just hear noise. “’Minimalist’ is a label he hates but how else to describe his music, much of which involves a great deal of repetition? Think of Andy Warhol with his repeated pictures of Campbell’s soup tins and translate that visual image into sound. – The Herald (Scotland)

An interview with American art legend Robert Rauschenberg who, at age 74, is still creating, improvising, and expounding freely on “the way a serendipitist works.” “For me, art shouldn’t be a fixed idea that I have before I start making it. I want it to include all the fragility and doubt that I go through the day with. Sometimes I’ll take a walk just to forget whatever good idea I had that day because I like to go into the studio not having any ideas. I want the insecurity of not knowing.” – New York Times

This week is the 100th anniversary of the birth of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. He easily makes the Top Ten list of philosophers, and even has a degree of name recognition among the general public. “So where are the Nietzsche symposiums, the exhibitions, the 900-page reassessments? Where are the T-shirts?” – The Globe and Mail (Canada)