HOLLAND COTTER AND STEVE REICH AWARDED PULITZER PRIZES

New York Times art critic Holland Cotter has won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, reports the Los Angeles Times’s Christopher Knight. He’s the first art critic to receive the prize since the late Emily Genauer of Newsday won in 1974. Another art critic, Sebastian Smee, whose voice was added to the Boston Globe last May, was a finalist. In its citation, the Pulitzer committee said it was honoring Cotter, who has been a staff critic at the Times since 1998, for “his wide ranging reviews of art, from Manhattan to China, marked by acute observation, luminous writing and dramatic storytelling.”

Musician Steve Reich was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music, for his Double Sextet, which premiered on March 26, 2008, at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia. “It was a completely unexpected surprise,” Reich noted. “I think Double Sextet is definitely one of my best pieces, and I’m glad the Pulitzer committee felt the same way.”