David Hockney has agreed to a short visit as he supervises installation of his much anticipated landscape exhibition, opening at London's Royal Academy of Arts today (21 January). Not long after the Queen appointed him to the Order of Merit, we sip tea in a private Royal Academy office, looking...

When impresario Ernest Fleischmann retired in 1998, then-mayor Richard Riordan led a special ceremony proclaiming the Los Angeles Philharmonic's long-time executive vice president and managing director as the city's first-ever "living cultural treasure." Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed credited Fleischmann with transforming "a provincial second-rank orchestra into one...

When Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened in October, 1997, the architect's architect, Philip Johnson, called it "the greatest building of our time." This week, nearly 13 years later, Gehry and his Guggenheim are back amassing superlatives, courtesy of Vanity Fair. Previewing its August issue, the magazine's website just reported...

As global audiences gather to see Helen Mirren in a filmed National Theater production of Phaedra, I miss the real thing. I want to be at the National Theater in London, watching and listening to extraordinary actors live, onstage. I want to leaf through new British literature at its bookshop,...

On June 4, the celebrated architect Frank Gehry and I will bring our continuing public conversations about his life and times to the West Coast. At the Getty Center in Los Angeles, and previously at the New York Public Library and the Free Library of Philadelphia, I'll ask him a...