Archive for the ‘Art’ Category

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Firings watch.

Wednesday, March 19th, 2025

This could also be an “Art, damn it! Art!” watch, but I decided to go this way.

Jackson Arn was the art critic for the New Yorker.

Arn’s last work for the magazine was a highbrow essay entitled: “Should We View Tatlin As A Russian Constructivist Or A Ukrainian,” which was published on March 10.

Note the past tense. Mr. Arn has been canned by the magazine. And not because the New Yorker has money troubles.

The New Yorker had a big 100th birthday celebration in February at some trendy place in NoHo.

Jackson Arn was accused of making “inappropriate overtures” at some of the party guests and appeared to be drunk at the shindig, whose attendees included star editor Tina Brown and author Zadie Smith, the New York Times reported Tuesday, citing anonymous sources with knowledge.

…

Writers including Smith, Jennifer Egan and Jeffrey Eugenides rubbed shoulders with former New Yorker editrix Brown, longtime art editor Françoise Mouly, staff writers Calvin Trillin and Adam Gopnik.

I almost wish I had been there, just so I could walk up to Calvin Trillin and ask him, “Do you want to blow this Popsicle stand and go get some dumplings in Chinatown?”

Here’s the NYT article, but it doesn’t add much detail.

Posted in Art, Firings, Media | No Comments »

Obit watch: March 15, 2025.

Saturday, March 15th, 2025

I lost pretty much the entire day yesterday to various things. I didn’t even get any pie.

One of the things that went by the wayside was obits, so here’s a quick and lazy roundup from the past few days. I have to rush off in a little bit to a wedding shower, and I’m not sure when I’m going to be back.

John Feinstein, sports writer and author. The only one of his books I’ve read is The Punch, which I wrote about a while back and thought was pretty good.

Chris Moore, artist. He illustrated quite a few SF books, and also did album covers for Fleetwood Mac and Rod Stewart.

Carl Lundstrom, who was one of the people behind the Pirate Bay website, died in a plane crash on Monday.

Ron Nessen, Gerald Ford’s press secretary, and one of the 892 Saturday Night Live hosts who have not committed murder. (I think that count is right, but it may be a little out of date.)

Larry Buendorf, retired Secret Service agent. He’s the guy who wrestled the gun away from Squeaky Fromme.

“Squeaky was back in the crowd, maybe one person back, and she had an ankle holster on with a .45,” he said, referring to a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol. “That’s a big gun to have on your ankle. So, when it came up, it came up low, and I happened to be looking in that direction, I see it coming, and I step in front of him, not sure what it was other than that it was coming up pretty fast, and yelled out ‘Gun!’ When I yelled out ‘Gun!’ I popped that .45 out of her hand.”
He added: “I got a hold of her fingers, and she’s screaming — the crowd is screaming — and I’m thinking, ‘I don’t have a vest on, I don’t know where the next shot is coming from,’ and that I don’t think she’s alone. All of this is going on while I’m trying to control her.”
“She turns around, and I pulled her arm back and dropped her to the ground, and agents and police come from the back of the crowd” as Ms. Fromme shrieked in disbelief, he said.
“She’s screaming, ‘It didn’t go off!’” he continued. “I had it in my hand. I knew what she was doing, she was pulling back on the slide, and I hit the slide before she could chamber a round. If she’d had a round chambered, I couldn’t have been there in time. It would’ve gone through me and the president.”

If the Times account is to be trusted, she had four rounds in the magazine and the hammer cocked, but she hadn’t chambered a round.

Kevin Drum, leftist political blogger.

He also invented Friday cat blogging.

Alan K. Simpson, former Republican senator from Wyoming.

He had been struggling to recover from a broken hip that he sustained in December, according to a statement from his family and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, a group of museums of which he was a board member for 56 years. The statement said his recovery had been hindered by complications of frostbite to his left foot about five years ago that required the amputation of his left leg below the knee.

Raul M. Grijalva, current Democratic House rep from Arizona.

Mr. Grijalva (pronounced gree-HAHL-vah) disclosed last year that he had lung cancer and would not run for a 13th term in 2026. He died of complications of his treatment, his office said. He was absent from Washington for nearly a year, missing hundreds of votes in the narrowly divided House.

Posted in 1911, Art, Books, Guns, Heroism, Obits, Politics, Sports | 1 Comment »

Short art, damn it! Art! watch.

Tuesday, February 18th, 2025

This is not something I regularly get a chance to cover, especially since 2020. So when it comes up, I can’t help but make note of it.

“‘The Gates’ was a huge art sensation 20 years ago — and it wasn’t the only vision Christo and Jeanne-Claude had for NYC”.

The NYPost article includes concept art for some of their other proposed, but never completed, projects for NYC.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude had an obsession with oil barrels. “They were so easy to stack and you could paint them all these different colors,” said Yavachev. “You could use them almost like pixels.”

Posted in Art, Bagatelle, Christo | No Comments »

Obit watch: January 24, 2025.

Friday, January 24th, 2025

Aaron De Groft. I don’t think many people will recognize the name, but his story allows me to indulge one of this blog’s interests: art crime.

Mr. De Groft was the director of the Orlando Museum of Art.

In February 2022, the Orlando Museum of Art opened a blockbuster exhibition of 25 paintings that Mr. [Jean-Michel] Basquiat was said to have created in 1982, when he was 22 and living in Venice, Calif.
Mr. De Groft said that Mr. Basquiat had sold the artworks, most of them painted and drawn on slabs of cardboard, for $5,000 in cash, and that they had languished for decades in a Los Angeles storage unit. In 2012, Mr. De Groft said, the storage unit was foreclosed for lack of payment and the contents auctioned off. A little-known dealer purchased the artworks for about $15,000.

Mr. Basquiat is a big deal in the art world, and this was a major coup for the musuem.

At the time of the exhibition, they were said to be worth nearly $100 million. Some museum staff members raised concerns about their authenticity but were rebuffed by the museum’s board chairwoman and threatened by Mr. De Groft with termination if they publicly aired their skepticism.

Hmmmm. Hmmmm hmmmm hmmm. Hmmm.

Days after the exhibit opened, The New York Times published an article raising questions about the paintings. The article noted doubts expressed by several curators, and reported that one of the paintings was made on a piece of cardboard shipping material containing a printed FedEx typeface not used by that company until 1994 — six years after Mr. Basquiat’s death and 12 years after Mr. De Groft and the painting’s owners said the painting was made.
The F.B.I. raided the museum four months later, confiscating all 25 works. An affidavit revealed that the bureau had been investigating the artworks and their owners for a decade.

Hmmm!

Mr. De Groft was fired. The museum sued him.

After the Basquiat exhibit was shut down, a Los Angeles auctioneer admitted to the F.B.I. that he had helped create the faux Basquiats in 2012, some in as little as five minutes.
Mr. De Groft countersued the museum for wrongful termination, calling their claims a “public relations stunt intended to save face.” He still insisted that the Basquiats were genuine.
He said the artworks’ owners had commissioned a forensic investigation by a handwriting expert, who identified the signatures on many of the paintings as being Mr. Basquiat’s. He also cited an analysis by a Basquiat expert — since disavowed — and statements by a member of the Basquiat estate’s now-defunct authentication committee, who found the paintings to be genuine.

The status of the lawsuits is unclear. The Wikipedia section in Basquiat’s entry on “Forgeries” is interesting.

Jack De Mave, actor. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “The Fugitive” (the original), “Adam-12”, and an uncredited role in “1776”.

Posted in Art, Law, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: October 11, 2024.

Friday, October 11th, 2024

Ethel Kennedy.

Thomas Rockwell, author. His most famous book is perhaps How to Eat Fried Worms.

He was also Norman’s son.

Posing for a painting that depicted him rummaging through his grandfather’s overcoat pocket was one of his favorite childhood memories, he told Cobblestone, a children’s magazine, in 1989. That image appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post in 1936.
“I had to stand on tiptoe while reaching into the overcoat, which was hung on an easel,” Mr. Rockwell said, describing how his father had composed the painting. “My father gave me a present for posing, and I remember feeling so proud and pleased that I’d helped him with his work. I know I’ve never enjoyed any gift as much as that one.”

This one goes out to great and good FotB pigpen51: Greg Landry, quarterback.

He wore the Lions’ Honolulu blue and silver for 11 seasons, tallying 12,451 yards and 80 touchdown passes.
In 1971, his first year as a starter, Landry passed for 2,237 yards and 16 touchdowns, earning a first-team All-Pro nod and his only trip to the Pro Bowl. He was the last Lions quarterback to earn that distinction until Matthew Stafford was named an alternate for the 2014 Pro Bowl.

…

Unusual for an era marked by pocket passers, Landry did damage with his legs as well as his right arm: He rushed for 2,655 yards over his career, which concluded with stints with the Baltimore Colts and the Chicago Bears. In both 1971 and 1972, he ran for more than 500 yards.

…

But with Landry, who was physically imposing at 6-foot-4, the Lions designed running plays for him, as would later be the case with current dual-threat quarterbacks like Lamar Jackson of the Baltimore Ravens and Josh Allen of the Buffalo Bills. The Lions even took a page from college football playbooks and drew up option plays, in which the quarterback has the option to carry the ball himself after the snap or pitch it to a running back, a rarity in the N.F.L.
Landry showed off his burst early in his career, during the Lions’ rout of the Green Bay Packers in the opening game of the 1970 season. Closing out the game in relief of the starter Bill Munson, Landry called a quarterback sneak on third down with two yards to go at the Lions’ 13-yard line. Instead of gutting out a few yards for a first down, he burst through the Packers’ defense and galloped for 76 yards — the longest run for a Lion since 1951.

Great and good FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Nobuyo Oyama, Japanese voice actress.

For about 25 years, Ms. Oyama was the voice of Doraemon, a character that first appeared in a manga created in 1969. Doraemon is a robot from the future, sent by its owner to the present day to help his great-great-grandfather solve his childhood problems and change his family’s fortunes.
The plump, earless, catlike robot typically helped the boy, Nobita Nobi, using gadgets from the future that he kept in his magical pocket. His deepening friendship with Nobita and his family was part of what made “Doraemon” one of the longest-running shows in Japan and beyond.

Posted in Art, Books, History, NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Art, damn it, art! watch (#62 in a series)

Tuesday, August 20th, 2024

The art market is collapsing.

At least, according to the NYT. “Young Artists Rode a $712 Million Boom. Then Came the Bust.”

Subhead: “Artists saw six-figure sales and heard promises of stardom. But with the calamitous downturn in the art market, many collectors bolted — and prices plummeted.”

The paper of record gives examples such as Amani Lewis:

First came the meteoric rise. A haunting painting Lewis made in 2020 sold at auction just a year later for $107,100, more than double its estimate. Two other works had recently tripled expectations, and a collector offered $150,000 in cash for new pieces fresh from the studio. There were shows in Paris and Miami — Lewis had seemingly conquered the market at age 26, upgrading to a new art studio and a Tesla.
But when the original painting re-emerged at auction in June and its price plunged to $10,080 — losing 90 percent of its value — the party was over. By then, Lewis had stopped renting a $7,000-a-month luxury apartment in Miami and temporarily moved in with their brother.
“It was such a nice high and then it drops,” the artist, now 29, said. “It feels like, ‘We’re done with Amani Lewis.’”

More:

The Ghanaian artist Emmanuel Taku had a painting sell in 2021 for $189,000 only to watch its price drop in March to $10,160 at auction. Cubist-style portraits by Isshaq Ismail, which sold for as much as $367,000 two years ago, have failed to rise beyond $20,000. Allison Zuckerman, a Brooklyn artist, also felt the market’s contractions; her riotous painting “Woman With Her Pet” sold for $212,500 three years ago, but mustered only $20,160 at auction in June.

…

Mercier said that he and Taku were organizing a comeback and “cleaning up the mess,” and that Taku’s paintings should go for $25,000 to $50,000 (compared with previous heights closer to $189,000).

“…should go for $25,000 to $50,000”? Seems to reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work.

The comments on this article are now closed, but from my review of the ones already posted, there’s one recurring theme (which may also explain why the NYT closed the comments): these emperors have no clothes.

Or to put it another way: “The art shown in the article is awful — not something I would like to see in 10 years let alone 100.” And: “I’m not interested in looking at any of these paintings for months or years. No offence intended, but what’s the point of collecting paintings unless you enjoy looking at them.”

Posted in Art | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 8, 2024.

Monday, July 8th, 2024

Yoshihiro Uchida. I had not heard of him previously, but he sounds like a fascinating guy.

Mr. Uchida brought judo to the United States.

The son of Japanese immigrants, Uchida, who went by the nickname Yosh, began coaching judo at San Jose State in the 1940s, while he was still a student there.
It was a pivotal moment for the sport, which had been created in 1882 in Japan as a means of self-defense, built around a series of throws and holds that use opponents’ weight and movement against them. Americans had long incorporated elements of judo into other combat sports, and returning soldiers from the Pacific Theater brought a new level of interest in martial arts to the country.
Uchida, who had been practicing judo since he was 10, despaired over the quality of the training available, especially at the higher levels. Working with a judo coach at the University of California, Berkeley, he established standards for competition, including weight classes, and in 1953 won approval from the Amateur Athletic Union.
The first national amateur championships took place at San Jose State that same year. The first collegiate championships took place in 1962, and Mr. Uchida’s team won.

…

Uchida was also one of the winningest coaches ever, of any sport. Under his leadership the men’s team won 52 national championships in 62 years, and the much newer women’s team won 26. He remained involved with the team until shortly before his death.

…

Soon after the beginning of World War II, he was drafted into the Army. He served in a segregated all-Japanese-American unit, where he worked as a medical technician. The rest of his family was dispersed to internment camps — his parents to Arizona, his brothers to Northern California, his sister and her husband to Idaho.

…

He returned to San Jose State and graduated with a degree in biology in 1947. He also continued to coach judo, though the position paid so little that he had to find a second job.

…

On the side, Uchida obtained a loan to buy a run-down medical laboratory. He renovated it and within a few years was doing extensive business for San Jose doctors. He eventually owned a chain of 40 laboratories across Northern California, which he sold for $30 million in 1989.
He used the proceeds to partner with a group of investors to build an $80 million complex of affordable housing and commercial space in San Jose’s Japantown neighborhood.

He was 104 when he passed.

Paal Enger, the man who stole “The Scream”. (Well, one of them, anyway.)

Joan Benedict, actress. Other credits include “The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington”, “T.J. Hooker”, and “The Incredible Hulk”.

Doug Sheehan, actor. Other credits include “Columbo”, “In the Line of Duty: The F.B.I. Murders”, and “MacGyver” (original recipe).

Posted in Art, Law, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 18, 2024.

Tuesday, June 18th, 2024

Yesterday was an extended travel day. I got in around 5 PM last night, and had to unpack the car and take care of other business. So blogging opportunities were limited.

Oddly, I have to work today, and have meetings tonight. But tomorrow is a company holiday. I’m planning to post something of a trip report then.

In the meantime, a few obits.

Anouk Aimée, French actress. NYT (archived). IMDB.

Kevin Brophy, actor. Other credits include “Matt Houston”, “Trapper John, M.D.”, and a spinoff of a minor SF TV show from the 1960s.

Ben Vautier, French artist. I haven’t done an “Art, damn it! Art!” watch for a while, and he seems like a good candidate.

Forever looking to provoke, Mr. Vautier found a kindred spirit in 1962 when he met George Maciunas, who spearheaded the avant-garde Fluxus movement of the 1960s, which included Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik and other artists, and which drew from the iconoclastic Dada movement of the early 20th century.
Fluxus, as articulated in Mr. Maciunas’s 1963 manifesto, was intended as a revolution, a call to comrades to “promote living art, anti-art, promote non-art reality,” while purging the world of “dead art, imitation, artificial art.”
Mr. Vautier certainly did his part, as both a visual and performance artist, with works that straddled the line between conceptual art and punchline.
At the Documenta art festival in Kassel, Germany in 1972, he famously strung a banner that read “Kunst Ist Überflüssig” (“Art Is Superfluous”) across the top of the august Fridericianum museum.
He strove to show that art could be found in daily life, and in ordinary objects, as with his series “Tas,” in which he piled dirt and garbage into lots and signed them as if they were masterpieces.
Starting in the 1960s, Mr. Vautier gave staged performances — he called them “gestes” (“gestures”) — that could seem like practical jokes on the audience. In one, “Audience Piece No. 8” (1965), guests were informed that the next piece was to be presented in a special area. Ushers then led them in groups through back exits and abandoned them.
In “Piano Concerto No. 2 for Paik,” an apparent concert from the same year, a pianist fled the stage before playing a note and the orchestra chased him in hot pursuit, trying to drag him back.
Mr. Vautier was often all too willing to shock. In one performance piece, he urinated in a jar, which he then exhibited as if it were high art. In another, he repeatedly slammed his head against a wall.

James Kent, NYC chef.

He opened his own restaurant, Crown Shy, in 2019 with a partner, Jeff Katz, the general manager of Del Posto, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan that closed in 2021. “At Crown Shy, the Only False Step Is the Name” read the headline of a “critic’s pick” review by Pete Wells, the restaurant critic of The New York Times. (The name refers to tall trees’ tendency not to allow their upper stories to grow entangled with the branches of their neighbors.)
Mr. Wells wrote that Mr. Kent’s dishes “regularly over-deliver.” He singled out for praise “an almost absurdly creamy purée of white bean hummus under a fiery red slick of melted ’nduja; a beef tartare with toasted walnuts and rye croutons; and oysters served with “cucumber jelly, diced cucumbers, grains of jalapeño and microleaves of purple shiso.”

…

Crown Shy garnered one star from the Michelin restaurant guide. Saga earned two.
It was fine dining worthy of the European tradition, but with American casualness and an embrace of pop culture.
Mr. Kent played Wu-Tang Clan and the Notorious B.I.G. at Crown Shy. He eschewed a formal dress code. With his chef coat he could often be seen wearing expensive sneakers.
His spray-painted murals earned him a reputation as “a chef that’s also a wildly talented graffiti artist,” as Bloomberg reported in 2016. He was commissioned to do artwork at NoMad Hotel and the restaurant tech company Salido.

…

In April, The Times reported that Mr. Kent and Saga Hospitality Group had leased 3,000 square feet on the ground floor of the former Domino Sugar refinery in Brooklyn for a bakery and a “casual all-day restaurant.”
That same month, the lifestyle magazine The Robb Report described yet more ambitious plans. Mr. Kent was opening a new 140-seat restaurant on Park Avenue inspired by the Grand Central Oyster Bar, where his grandmother Sue Mingus first went on a date with the jazz musician Charles Mingus, who became her husband and whose legacy she took charge of overseeing until her death in 2022.
At the same time, Mr. Kent was planning a fast-casual fried chicken sandwich restaurant on the level of Shake Shack, The Robb Report said. LRMR Ventures, a private investment firm of LeBron James and his friend and business partner Maverick Carter, was backing Saga Hospitality Group’s expansion.
Investors “believe Kent’s a rare, multidimensional talent who’s primed to become the next great American restaurateur,” The Robb Report wrote.

He was 45.

Posted in Art, Food, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 30, 2024.

Thursday, May 30th, 2024

Bette Nash has passed away at 88.

Ms. Nash was the longest serving flight attendant ever. She started working for Eastern Air Lines in 1957, and kept working: first on the Trump Shuttle, then US Airways, and finally American. She never officially retired.

Wearing white gloves, heels and a pillbox hat, Ms. Nash served lobster and champagne, carved roast beef by request and passed out after-dinner cigarettes.
Things have changed a lot since then — the smoking is gone, and so is the carved meat — but Ms. Nash remained largely the same.

…

At a ceremony at Reagan National Airport to mark her 60th anniversary, in 2017, American Airlines presented her with a pair of diamond earrings and a $10,000 donation to the food bank where she volunteered.
Then she went to work, loading passengers for the next shuttle to Boston. As the plane taxied to the runway, a pair of fire trucks doused the plane with a water-cannon salute, an honor usually reserved for retiring pilots.

Richard Ellis, artist with a speciality. He specialized in sea creatures.

Mr. Ellis had no formal training in marine biology, conservation, painting or writing. But in fusing his artistic flair with an encyclopedic knowledge of ocean creatures, he became an invaluable, sui generis figure to conservationists, educators and those curious about sea life.
“Richard was an enthusiast, and he absolutely adored the natural world, especially the sea,” said Ellen V. Futter, the former president of the natural history museum, where Mr. Ellis was a research associate for many years. “He wanted everybody to share his appreciation and joy from the beauty of it, but also to feel the same sense of responsibility to protect it.”

…

His photorealistic paintings of whales were sold in an art gallery and published in Audubon and National Wildlife magazines and in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His more than a dozen books about marine life — especially his tomes on whales, sharks and tuna — made him, in the view of the best-selling author Simon Winchester, the “poet laureate of the marine world.”

I know I have a bias in the direction of photo realistic and representational art. But Mr. Ellis’s work looks fantastic: I would be proud to have an original Ellis hanging on one of my walls.

Posted in Art, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 6, 2024.

Monday, May 6th, 2024

Bernard Hill. NYT. IMDB.

Frank Stella, artist.

Mr. Stella was a dominant figure in postwar American art, a restless, relentless innovator whose explorations of color and form made him an outsize presence, endlessly discussed and constantly on exhibit.
Few American artists of the 20th century arrived with quite his éclat. He was in his early 20s when his large-scale black paintings — precisely delineated black stripes separated by thin lines of blank canvas — took the art world by storm. Austere, self-referential, opaque, they cast a chilling spell.

Jeannie Epper, stuntwoman. 161 stunt credits in IMDB (and another 39 actress credits). Seems like she was working pretty steadily from 1964 all the way to 2021, including “Play Misty For Me”, “Soylent Green”, “Blazing Saddles”, “The Blues Brothers”, and “Road House” (the good one).

Lawrence sent over an obit for Edgar Lansbury. I had seen this elsewhere and didn’t think he was noteworthy enough, but Lawrence pointed out that he produced “Squirm“.

Lawrence also sent over an obit for Dick Rutan, legendary pilot. He’s the guy who, with Jeana Yeager, flew non-stop around the world in nine days, three minutes, and 44 seconds in “Voyager”. Unfortunately, the obit Lawrence sent me came from a blog by way of a blog, and I’d rather have something more substantial to link to: none of the flying news publications I know of have this story yet. I’ll link to a better obit when I find one.

Posted in 1970s, Art, Movies, Obits, Planes, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: March 27, 2024.

Wednesday, March 27th, 2024

Daniel Kahneman, psychologist and winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

Professor Kahneman, who was long associated with Princeton University and lived in Manhattan, employed his training as a psychologist to advance what came to be called behavioral economics. The work, done largely in the 1970s, led to a rethinking of issues as far-flung as medical malpractice, international political negotiations and the evaluation of baseball talent, all of which he analyzed, mostly in collaboration with Amos Tversky, a Stanford cognitive psychologist who did groundbreaking work on human judgment and decision-making.

I’ve heard some people endorse Thinking, Fast and Slow. I’ve heard other people say it is overrated and much of the research cited has not been replicated.

Much of Professor Kahneman’s work is grounded in the notion — which he did not originate but organized and advanced — that the mind operates in two modes: fast and intuitive (mental activities that we’re more or less born with, called System One), or slow and analytical, a more complex mode involving experience and requiring effort (System Two).
Others have personified these mental modes as Econs (rational, analytical people) and Humans (emotional, impulsive and prone to exhibit unconscious mental biases and an unwise reliance on dubious rules of thumb). Professor Kahneman and Professor Tversky used the word “heuristics” to describe these rules of thumb. One is the “halo effect,” where in observing a positive attribute of another person one perceives other strengths that aren’t really there.

Ron Harper, actor. Other credits include “FBI: The Unheard Music Untold Stories”, “Dragnet” (the 1989-1991 version), “87th Precinct” (he played “Bert Kling”), and “Walker, Texas Ranger” (the Chuck Norris one).

Richard Serra, sculptor.

Mr. Serra enjoyed both great notoriety and great fame over the course of his long career, with notoriety coming first. In 1971, a rigger was crushed to death when one plate of a piece being installed at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis accidentally came loose. Many people in the art world — artists, curators, critics, museum directors — urged Mr. Serra to stop making sculpture, even though an investigation revealed that the crane operator had not properly followed the rigging instructions.
Mr. Serra’s early public pieces sometimes met with opposition, most famously “Tilted Arc,” commissioned by the General Services Administration and completed in 1981. The work — a gently curving, slightly leaning wall of rusting steel 12 feet high and 120 feet long — was installed in a plaza in front of a federal office building in Lower Manhattan. Some people who worked there regarded it as an eyesore and a danger and petitioned to have it removed. A hearing was held to consider arguments pro and con, after which the G.S.A. decided in favor of removal.
Dismayed and infuriated, Mr. Serra sued the government to keep the work in place, vowing that he would leave the country if it were dismantled. He lost his suit, and “Tilted Arc” was taken down in March 1989. But he continued to be based in New York.

Peter G. Angelos, former owner of the Baltimore Orioles. (He and his family made a deal to sell the team earlier this year, but it hasn’t been approved by MLB yet.)

Posted in Art, Geek, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 1, 2024.

Friday, March 1st, 2024

Richard Abath.

Mr. Abath was one of the two guards on duty at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum early in the morning on March 18, 1990. He was the one who let the two robbers, disguised as police officers, into the museum.

Over the next hour and a half, the thieves stole more than a dozen works of art, including pieces by Edgar Degas, Rembrandt van Rijn, Édouard Manet and Peter Paul Rubens, cutting the works from their ornate wooden frames. They also took an ancient Chinese beaker and a bronze eagle finial from a Napoleonic-era flagpole.

…

All together they took some $500 million in art, the equivalent of $1.2 billion today, making it by far the biggest art heist in history.
Suspicion immediately turned to Mr. Abath. City and federal investigators zeroed in on important details, like the coincidence of the thieves arriving so soon after the second guard left to make the rounds. A video camera outside the museum showed Mr. Abath briefly opening a side door not long before the robbery occurred.
Mr. Abath maintained his innocence throughout the rest of his life, and he was never named as an official suspect. He said that he regularly opened the side door to make sure it was locked and that while museum protocol forbade him from letting anyone in after hours, there was no contingency should the visitors be uniformed police officers.
“You know, most of the guards were either older or they were college students,” he told NPR in 2015. “Nobody there was capable of dealing with actual criminals.”

Brian Mulroney, former Canadian PM.

Posted in Art, Law, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

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