Michael Smith (performance artist)

Michael Smith is an American artist born in Chicago, in 1951. He is an influential figure in performance art, video art, and installation art. In the 1980s, he was perceived as "the quirky Ed Sullivan" of the time.

Mike

He is best known for his performance persona named Mike, the central figure in an ongoing series of narrative projects. Mike, an innocent character who continually falls victim to trends and fashions and his own naive ambitions, allows Smith to comment on discrepancies and absurdities in American culture while creating an unsettling and poignant mixture of humor and pathos. In a 1982 interview, Smith had once commented on his work "I’m more interested in getting a feeling across to somebody than an idea. I was interested in getting ideas across when I first started performing but I’m not too interested in that now."

Education

Michael Smith received his Bachelor of Arts from Colorado College and attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. He currently teaches in the Transmedia Area in the Department of Art + Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught in the Master of Fine Arts programs at Yale, the Cranbrook Academy of Art, UCLA, Art Center College of Design, Columbia University, and CalArts. He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1985), and four National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Fellowships (1978, '82, '88, '91).

Michael Smith (judge)

Sir Michael Smith, 1st Baronet, of Tuam (1740–1809) was an Irish judge. He was the founder of a judicial dynasty, some of whose members were noted for eccentricity. He was also the first of the Cusack-Smith baronets.

He was born at Newtown, County Offaly, the son of William Smith (died 1747) and his wife Hester Lynch of Galway : his family had come to Ireland from Yorkshire in the seventeenth century, and acquired substantial property in the Midlands. Michael evidently revered the memory of his father, who died when his son was only seven, and later composed a eulogy which was inscribed on his father's tombstone. He graduated from the University of Dublin, and was called to the Bar in 1769. He was elected member of the Irish House of Commons for Randalstown in 1783, and was noted for his eloquence.

He was raised to the Bench as a Baron of the Court of Exchequer (Ireland) in 1793; in 1801 he became Master of the Rolls in Ireland, retiring in 1806. The Mastership of the Rolls had long been notorious as a sinecure for politicians, many of whom had no legal qualifications whatever : the appointment of Smith, a lawyer of undoubted ability, is thought to have been a conscious policy of making the Mastership a full-time and responsible judicial office; the policy was largely successful.

Michael Smith (newspaper reporter)

Michael Smith is a British author who specializes in spies and espionage. He is a former journalist who obtained the documents collectively known as the The Downing Street Memos. The Downing Street memo itself was an official record of a meeting of the British war cabinet held in July 2002. It revealed the disclosure by Sir Richard Dearlove, then the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), that the intelligence to justify an invasion was being "fixed around the policy". The Downing Street memo was in fact just one of eight documents obtained by Smith which showed that President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed in April 2002 to invade Iraq; that they planned to "wrongfoot" Saddam Hussein to give them the excuse to do so; and that they used flights over the southern no-fly zone of Iraq to begin the air war against Iraq in May 2002, with "spikes of activity" which they hoped might provoke Iraq into reacting and giving them the excuse to go to war.