Deborah Solomon

Deborah Solomon (born August 9, 1957, New York City) is an American art critic, journalist and biographer. She is best-known for her weekly column, "Questions For," which ran in The New York Times Magazine from 2003 to 2011.

Early life and education

Solomon was born in New York City and grew up in New Rochelle, New York. She was educated at Cornell University, where she majored in art history and served as the associate editor of The Cornell Daily Sun. She earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1979. The following year, she received a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Professional work

Solomon began her career writing about art for various publications, including The New Criterion. For most of the 1990s, she served as the chief art critic of The Wall Street Journal. She has written extensively about American painting, and is the author of several biographies of American artists, including Jackson Pollock and Joseph Cornell. Solomon was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001 in the category of biography.

After leaving her regular column at the New York Times Magazine in 2011, Solomon said she would focus on her "almost finished" biography on Norman Rockwell.

"Questions For"

On January 5, 2003, Solomon made her debut as the New York Times Magazine's "Questions For" columnist. Her column became famous almost overnight for its singular mix of wit and opinion. In 2010, Solomon was ranked by the Daily Beast as one of "The Left's Top 25 Journalists." . Solomon "is brilliantly transforming the interview format into a form of criticism," according to a critic for New York Magazine.

Asked to characterize her political beliefs, Solomon once said, "I'm not dependably pro-anything, except pro-thinking. I ask the questions that any curious person would if they had the chance to go around and converse with the architects of our policies and culture." Over the years, her column has featured interviews with many key Republicans, including Karl Rove, former attorney generals John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, George Shultz, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao and Sandra Day O'Connor.

In February 2011, newly appointed Times Magazine editor, Hugo Lindgren, fired Solomon along with the magazine's other regular columnists ("Ethicist" Randy Cohen, "The Medium's" Virginia Heffernan, and Ben Zimmer of "On Language") as part of his effort to reinvent the magazine. With the encouragement of the senior management, Solomon will continue to write for the Times.

Personal life

She is married to Kent Sepkowitz, a physician and infectious-disease specialist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and they have two sons, Eli Sepkowitz and Leo Sepkowitz, the founder of the sports blog, Leobeingleo.com.

She is of Romanian descent on her father's side.

Criticism

In 2006, NBC television host Tim Russert, who was interviewed by Solomon for her "Questions For" column, publicly accused her of distorting his comments. The interview was scheduled for Mother's Day, and, in the published version, Solomon repeatedly asks Russert to describe memories of his mother, only to have Russert evade her and talk about other topics. Russert charged, in a letter to the editor, that Solomon failed to include his comments about his mother and made him sound disloyal to her.

In 2007, The New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt recommended that the Times run a disclaimer indicating the "Questions For" column is edited down from a much longer text. Each column now says at the bottom, "Interview has been condensed and edited."

In 2010, Solomon was criticized by bloggers as too pro-Israel when, during an interview of former Israeli Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni published in the New York Times, she responded to remembrance of acts terrorism by Livini's parents by saying "it was a more romantic era."

92nd Street Y controversy

On November 29, 2010, at the 92nd Street Y in New York, Solomon interviewed actor Steve Martin about his new novel, An Object of Beauty, which is set in the art world. In response to emails received in real-time by the Y staff from viewers of the interview, a note was dispatched to Solomon on-stage, telling her to shift the conversation from art to Steve Martin's film career.

The next day, the Y issued an apology to audiences, along with a promise of a refund, prompting much controversy. Solomon told The New York Times, "Frankly, you would think that an audience in New York, at the 92nd Street Y, would be interested in hearing about art and artists. I had no idea that the Y programmers wanted me to talk to Steve instead on what it's like to host the Oscars or appear in It's Complicated with Alec Baldwin. I think the Y, which is supposedly a champion of the arts, has behaved very crassly and is reinforcing the most philistine aspects of a culture that values celebrity and award shows over art."

In an op-ed piece in The New York Times, Martin praised Solomon an "art scholar" and said he would have rather "died onstage with art talk" than with the movie trivia questions the Y had chosen for him.

Bibliography

• Jackson Pollock: A Biography, Simon & Schuster, 1987, ISBN 978-0815411826
• Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997, ISBN 0-374-18012-1
• A biography of Norman Rockwell, to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2011

External links

• Interviews by Deborah Solomon for the New York Times
• Article on Deborah Solomon in Good Magazine, February 14, 2007
• Arthur Danto's review of Solomon's Utopia Parkway, Slate, March 26, 1997
• Interview with Deborah Solomon in the New York Times Book Review, June 13, 2010