New York-based art pioneer Dennis Oppenheim died over the weekend at the age of 72; known for a large body of work that spanned the Land Art, Body Art, and Conceptual Art movements, and then later, his “machine works,” Oppenheim was constantly innovating and refused to allow himself to be pigeonholed. “I have never been able to be what they call a signature artist,” Artinfo quotes him as saying. “Most of my work comes from ideas. I can usually do only a few versions of each idea. Land Art and Body Art were particularly strong concepts which allowed for a lot of permutations. But nevertheless, I found myself wanting to move onward into something else.” We look at some of his most recent pieces — the large-scale, often controversial public artworks that dominated the latter part of his career — after the jump.
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While it has yet to be confirmed by a major news outlet, TMZ is reporting that actor Gary Coleman has died at the age of 42. Following a fall in his home on Wednesday, Coleman suffered a serious brain hemorrhage, and had been on life support in an intensive care unit at a Utah hospital.
Coleman broke into acting in the late ’70s/early ’80s as Arnold Jackson on Diff’rent Strokes, where his catchphrase “What’cu Talkin Bout Willis” made him into a household name. A congenital kidney disease, which slowed his growth in childhood, resulted in both his small stature (4’8″), two kidney transplants, and daily dialysis; earlier this year he suffered from an unexplained seizure on the set of The Insider. He is survived by his wife Shannon Price.
Update: The Utah Valley Regional Medical Center has confirmed Coleman’s death.
In their obituary for artist Dustin Shuler, who died earlier this month, the New York Times refers to him as a sculptor known for “known for impaling things, flattening things and putting things on top of other things.” Which sounds unremarkable if you’re not aware that said “things” were cars, resulting in large-scale pieces of roadside art that dotted hotels and shopping centers around the country. Shuler’s work was seen by many as a form of social commentary, but as he told The Chicago Sun-Times in 1996: “There’s no message. I go by gut feeling.”
You probably recognize his most famous piece, Spindle, which cameoed as the “Car Kabob” in the Wayne’s World movies; it was demolished a few years ago to make way for a Walgreens store. Click through to explore more of Shuler’s work.
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According to Billboard, Bob Mercer, the British music industry veteran responsible for the “NOW That’s What I Call Music” phenomenon (aka, the way my mom kept up with “the hits” for over a decade now), has died at the age of 65. It should be noted that beyond launching the NOW series, Mercer also signed artists at EMI including Queen, Kate Bush, Marc Bolan and Olivia Newton-John in the ’70s, got pissed when the label dropped the Sex Pistols, and briefly managed Paul McCartney.
But we’re here to eulogize NOW. After the jump, prepare to rock out to our “NOW That’s What I Call Music” Megamix — a best of compilation of all 33 best of compilations.
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Today the New York Times announced that artist John Schoenherr died last week at the age of 74. Schoenherr illustrated more than 40 children’s books, including Owl Moon
, his 1988 Caldecott winner. Science-fiction fans might also recognize his illustrations from Frank Herbert’s Dune series (Hebert famously called him “the only man who has ever visited Dune”) or book jackets for the likes of Philip K. Dick, John Brunner, and Anne McCaffrey.
As the Times notes, Schoenherr is “widely credited with helping shape midcentury America’s collective image of alien landscapes and their occupants.” That said, he started out with aspirations of painting, not commercial illustration: “I just got sidetracked into illustration by things like mortgages and children. Not a bad way to prostitute yourself.”
View a selection of his work after the jump.
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When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, we thought we’d lost Alex Chilton. M.I.A. for several days after the storm hit, fans and friends breathed a collective sigh of relief when it was reported that Chilton was alive and well on September 6, 2005.
On March 17th, the inaugural night of the 2010 South by Southwest Music festival in Austin, Texas, rumors of Chilton’s death added a dark undercurrent to the city, the same city where Chilton was to perform on Saturday with Big Star. It would have been the first Big Star show of 2010; the most recent performance anywhere was at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple in November of 2009, a surprise one-off show in honor of the Big Star box set released last year. The news came later, scant and final: Alex Chilton was rushed to the hospital after complaining of chest pains and pronounced dead of a heart attack that evening. He was 59.
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This morning TMZ broke the news that 38-year-old actor Corey Haim had been discovered dead in his apartment by his mother after overdosing on drugs. While most people weren’t surprised by the news (in a 2007 interview he admitted to popping up to 85 Valium a day at the height of his addiction), those of us who grew up watching Haim in his ’80s heyday were deeply saddened. He was like so hot back then; we wanted to be Alyssa Milano. After the jump we’ll look at a handful of the cinematic gems from the decade that made him a star.
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Some terribly sad news: Fashion designer Alexander McQueen was discovered dead in his home this morning after apparently committing suicide. Foul play is not suscpected. According to the Daily Mail, a source at his office confirmed the news, saying: “It is a tragic loss. We are not making a comment at this time out of respect for the McQueen family.” This comes less than three years after the designer’s close friend Isabella Blow — who is also credited with discovering him — tragically took her life in May 2007.
Once considered an enfant terrible of fashion, at 40 McQueen was well on his way to becoming one of the all-time greats. In her review of his 2010 Spring collection, New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn wrote:
“What is hard to appreciate is the amount of thought and work that went into the making of the clothes. The prints and fabrics were amazing, but then consider a slim gray coat cut clean open at the chest and then closed in a soft arc near the hem, as if the whole thing had been hollowed out of an existing coat and this was the shape that remained. Shown over a print dress, with a matching lining, the coat seemed a different species of garment. It was most definitely a new silhouette.”
A new silhouette — just reflect on that for a second.
More updates and details as they’re released.
According to a statement by the reclusive author’s son, J.D. Salinger has died of natural causes at the age of 91 in New Hampshire. Best known for his 1951 classic, The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger introduced a new, mercurial voice into American writing, and with it, a teenage anti-hero who would become a role model for generations of misanthropes to come.
Salinger withdrew from public life in the ’50s, rejecting fame and refusing interviews. In 1999, a series of old letters between Salinger and fellow writer/one-time flame Joyce Maynard (who was an 18-year-old Yale University freshman at the time), were bought on the auction block by Peter Norton. He returned them to Salinger.
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David Levine, an illustrator known for his snarky, often political caricatures in The New York Review of Books, died on Tuesday morning at the age of 83. According to his New York Times obit, Levine’s work was “not only witty but serious, not only biting but deeply informed, and artful in a painterly sense as well as a literate one.” It goes on to call him “the heir of the 19th-century masters of the illustration, Honoré Daumier and Thomas Nast.” While he was well known for his send ups of Lyndon B. Johnson and Henry Kissinger, his all-time favorite subject was Richard Nixon — in fact, he drew him 66 times. “I might want to be critical, but I don’t wish to be destructive,” Levine once explained. “Caricature that goes too far simply lowers the viewer’s response to a person as a human being.”
Check out just a few of his Tricky Dicks from the late ’60s and early ’70s after the jump.
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