Blogrolling
Fishbowl New York and its new editor Ron Mwangaguhunga, aka The Corsair, interviewed me by e-mail late last week for its 5 Questions feature and the result is here. Ron’s name, by the way, looks hard to say, but he swears it’s “pretty phonetic, really.”
Schadenschwarzmanfreude (Eastern Division)
“O senior officials of the Chinese government, please do not be fooled by sweet-talking wolves dressed in human skin,” a blogger writes of the Chinese government’s early investment in Blackstone Group, per today’s New York Times business section. Look at it this way, Steve Schwarzman, it beats being called “ostentatious, churlish, megalo maniacal, tone-deaf — […]
Italy Gets Getty Booty
The Italian government has concluded an agreement for the return of 40 antiquities from the Getty museum in Los Angeles, the latest coup in its crusade to recover what it deems Italy’s cultural patrimony. The Metropolitan Museum made a similar deal last year. The blog Looting History analyzes the news here, and wonders aloud about […]
Hello, I Won’t Be Going… Yet
A portrait of the Director as a much-younger man. (Philippe de Montebello moonlighting as a book-jacket model.) Charles McGrath of the New York Times takes a fascinating look at the thirty-year-long reign of Metropolitan Museum of Art director Philippe de Montebello, 71, in tomorrow’s Arts & Leisure section — and the lingering uncertainty about who […]
D. D. Ryan, R.I.P
Dorinda Dixon Ryan, better known as D.D., died this morning after a brief illness. She was a fashion editor at Harpers Bazaar, a costume designer (for Stephen Sondheim), the matchmaker who helped create the Eloise series by introducing author Kay Thompson to illustrator Hilary Knight, a central figure in the inner circle around the late […]
Schadenschwarzmanfreude Pt. II
Dealbreaker asks, “Does Private Equity Hate Stephen Schwarzman?” Though it practitioners do think him “ostentatious, churlish, megalomaniacal, tone-deaf — and a hypocritical dissembler to boot,” my impression is that they’ll hold their noses and do business with him when its to their advantage.
The Old New Journalism
In today’s New York Times, George Vecsey writes on the baseball great Don Newcombe and mentions a story about Newcombe by my father, the late Milton Gross, who was a sports columnist for the New York Post for about thirty years, calling it “one of the great sports columns of that or any other era.” […]
In the Pink
My review of Fifteen Central Park West appears smack in the middle of this week’s New York Observer. Curbed.com says I gave the building “the gross treatment” but missed two little scooplets buried deep in the piece: banking biggie Sandy Weill and Och-Ziff’s head hedge hog Dan Och are among those soon to move in […]
Name Games
From concert stages to museum toilets, anything goes (up for sale) nowadays when it comes to what philanthropic organizations call naming opportunities. In the new issue of Contribute, I look at the naming marketplace, its pleasures and its pitfalls. The biggest one? As Page Six writes of the article today, “Forever is no longer forever.” […]
Win For All?
Has Shelby White, the antiquities collector and Metropolitan Museum of Art trustee and benefactress, agreed to repatriate some of her storied hoard to Italy? Il Messaggero thinks maybe. The artsjournal blog CultureGrrl translates a vague but nonetheless promising comment by Italian culture minister Francesco Rutelli: “… We are a step away from a final accord… […]