Byline: By richard siklos section: Section C; Column ; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. Length
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URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: GERIATRICS (90%); BABY BOOMERS (89%); WRITERS & WRITING (90%); PHYSICIANS & SURGEONS (71%); DRAMA LITERATURE (71%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (71%); REFUGEES (69%); BOOK REVIEWS (78%); LITERATURE (68%) Books and Literature; Reviews PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (50%) Janet Maslin; Sara Davidson GEOGRAPHIC: COLORADO, USA (71%); CONNECTICUT, USA (58%) UNITED STATES (71%) LOAD-DATE: February 19, 2007 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: Photo: Sara Davidson (Photo by Valari Jack) DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 1110 of 1258 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Music Labels Offer Teasers To Download BYLINE: By JEFF LEEDS SECTION: Section C; Column 6; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1 LENGTH: 1086 words For all the disquiet the Internet has fostered in the music business, almost every rock star and record executive is intrigued with the prospect of marketing to music fans directly instead of wrangling for exposure with radio programmers or retailers. But the expansion of the online marketplace, coupled with ever-worsening CD sales, is now all but forcing the music companies to tread on ground they once viewed as off limits. Starting this week, Suretone Records, a label distributed by the Universal Music Group, plans to distribute video files featuring popular acts like Weezer and new bands like Drop Dead Gorgeous on file-sharing networks that the industry has long viewed as illicit bazaars for pirates. Unlike the music audio and video files that major labels sell at services like iTunes, the video files will not be wrapped in protective software to limit copying, executives say. But they will also be incomplete: users who download them will see perhaps half the video and will be directed to the label's own Web site to watch the complete version -- and the advertising planned to run alongside. The plan represents one of the latest signs that, after years of suing individual users and file-swapping services, the recording industry is recognizing that it might have to loosen its control to attract the giant audience found in largely unregulated corners of the Internet. And there is new reason for urgency. The music business has been buckling beneath the pressure of widespread piracy and plunging sales. Album sales declined 5 percent last year, and the scarcity of hits after the holidays has put the industry on a course to fall behind even last year's lackluster performance. Sales for the year so far are down more than 15 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan data. That has brought a profit warning from one music corporation, the EMI Group, and prompted dire forecasts industrywide. Digital sales are increasing, but not nearly enough to offset the drop. As a result, many executives are searching for other ways to reach the people who are trafficking in music and other media files in free file-sharing networks and on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. But how far the industry should go to appeal to them is now the subject of intense debate. One big issue is whether the four music conglomerates that dominate the industry should drop copy protection software, known as digital rights management, from the music files they license for sale online. The industry has already been dabbling in unprotected content, allowing the sale of songs from artists like Norah Jones, Jessica Simpson and Jesse McCartney on Yahoo and other sites. An array of online music retailers has called for doing away with the software completely. Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, whose iTunes music store is the most powerful of the those retailers, recently added his voice to the chorus, arguing that digital rights management has not halted piracy and that the industry's main format, the compact disc, carries unprotected files. EMI has discussed the idea of distributing unprotected music files with certain retailers, but there is little indication that the four companies, which control more than 70 percent of the world's music sales, will be willing to offer much of their catalogs without such software anytime soon. Still, there are indications that the record labels are re-examining their practices. RCA Records, for example, plans to advance its promotional campaign for Avril Lavigne's new album with the first in a series of short manga -- Japanese comic-book episodes -- in a storyline featuring the singer. The video clips, which run two to three minutes each, are expected to be released in unprotected form as free podcasts on iTunes, among other outlets. Fans will also be able to use special software, probably offered on a label's Web site, to take snippets of the episodes and rearrange them, executives said. Terry McBride, a longtime talent manager who represents Ms. Lavigne and other performers, said the campaign was a rare instance of a major label's agreeing to an uncontrolled release, and that he fully expected fans to post the clips on file-sharing networks. ''This becomes public property,'' he said. ''We're not going to tell the consumer how to consume.'' But Mr. McBride predicted that sharing the files would promote the album and set the stage for other ventures, including the sale of higher-quality versions of the video clips, or possibly advertising to go along with them. In any event, he added, the more CD sales suffer, the more pressure will build on record labels to rethink the rules of distribution and to drop limits on copying digital music. ''At the end of the day the whole object should be, let's fix the problem,'' said Jordan Schur, who set up the Suretone label last year as a joint venture with Universal after leaving another Universal label, Geffen Records. ''We know people are stealing music. We're not going to sit in judgment of them and say, 'Well, they're bad.' '' The label's files are being distributed online in an arrangement with ArtistDirect's MediaDefender unit, which is better known as a contractor hired by labels to place fake, or decoy, versions of songs or other media files on file-sharing networks to thwart would-be pirates. Before the Suretone video deal, the company had also begun planting fake files containing promotional messages for advertisers like Coca-Cola. ArtistDirect separately runs one of the most popular music Web sites on the Internet, ArtistDirect.com, and plans to have a channel there devoted to Suretone's video clips. Record labels are not shifting their view toward file-sharing across the board. Executives at Geffen recently found themselves at odds with the rap star Snoop Dogg, for example, after he started selling songs in unprotected form on his MySpace page, in a partnership with a San Francisco-area rap entrepreneur. Snoop Dogg also offered to sell other performers' songs on his page for a fee, a complete ''push and promote'' package costing $1,500. The offer was removed last week after The New York Times inquired whether it conformed to MySpace's terms and conditions, which generally prohibit users from selling space on their pages to outsiders. A number of independent artists offer their songs on MySpace. The reggae act Shaggy charges 99 cents a song, for example, and the band Barenaked Ladies charges 83 cents.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 1111 of 1258 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Saving North Korea's Refugees BYLINE: By Nicholas Eberstadt and Christopher Griffin. Nicholas Eberstadt is on the board of the United States Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Christopher Griffin is a research associate at the American Enterprise Institute. SECTION: Section A; Column 1; Editorial Desk; Pg. 15 LENGTH: 1092 words DATELINE: WASHINGTON THE Bush administration can point to precious few successes in its efforts to curb North Korea's mounting menace -- even last week's celebrated nuclear deal with Kim Jong-il's government is, for the moment, little more than a written promise from a highly unreliable negotiating partner. Yet inexplicably, the Bush team continues to overlook a spectacular opportunity to deliver freedom to tens of thousands of North Koreans, to pressure the country from within for fundamental change and to lay the groundwork for a peaceful, reunified Korean Peninsula. By fostering an underground railroad to rescue North Korean refugees living in China, the United States could do all these things at once. On humanitarian grounds alone, the case for action on behalf of the wretched North Koreans in hiding north of their country's border along the Yalu River is compelling. While the exact numbers are unknown, this refugee emergency may be second only to Darfur: the International Crisis Group speaks of scores of thousands of refugees, and recently uncovered Chinese official documents indicate hundreds of thousands. As illegal immigrants in China (Beijing insists North Korean border-crossers are economic migrants, or worse), they live in constant fear and at terrible risk. Women are forced into the sex trade or coerced marriages; men and children on the run have less obvious utility and thus, by some accounts, correspondingly higher mortality. Yet the North Korean refugees who end up as victims of exploitation, violence or crime in China may be the lucky ones. A far worse fate awaits those whom China ''refouls,'' or deports to North Korea in violation of Beijing's commitments under the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. North Korea regards fleeing Kim Jong-il's paradise as an act of disloyalty close to treason. Captives forcibly returned to North Korea face prison, torture and death, attesting to the refugee status that official Chinese wordplay denies. Despite a gradually hardening Chinese posture toward this humanitarian crisis (now entering its second decade), over the years a few private groups have been bravely spiriting refugees out of China and into third countries. Intrepid souls like Steve Kim of New York (jailed in China since 2003), Phillip Buck from Seattle (jailed for 15 months in 2005-2006), Adrian Hong (deported last December) and others from America, South Korea and elsewhere have rescued thousands of North Koreans from China, often by way of an arduous 6,000-mile overland journey into Southeast Asia, where North Korean refugees can seek resettlement in states that accept them. The desperation of North Korean refugees has also attracted unscrupulous entrepreneurs who guide refugees out of China for a profit. This latter-day flesh trade has been criticized by the governments of China and South Korea -- each eager, for its own reasons, to discredit any efforts at exodus from North Korea. But whether created by noble motives or mercenary ones, this continuing trickle of escapees proves that a path to freedom already exists. And that trickle would grow if these North Koreans knew they could count on official protection along the way. Some will worry loudly about international resettlement for tens (never mind hundreds) of thousands of North Korean refugees, but the logistical issues are basically solved in advance: as a matter of national law, South Korea is obliged to welcome them all. Under Articles 2 and 3 of the Republic of Korea's Constitution, as reaffirmed by the country's Supreme Court in 1996, every North Korean refugee has the right to resettle in South Korea. Commitments by Washington and other free governments to take in North Korean refugees are desirable and commendable (the United States is already committed to doing so under the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004), but it is natural and fitting that South Korea should be the destination for the overwhelming majority of North Korea's freedom-seekers. The critical missing piece for getting this underground railroad up and running is safe passage through China. But because the South Korean government fears antagonizing the North and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is too timid to face down Beijing, China's opposition to this rescue mission has gone unchallenged. Only the United States is in a position to help overcome Beijing's recalcitrance. The Chinese government's cost-benefit calculus regarding these refugees would change drastically if Washington weighed in as their advocate. If the United States (along with other governments) provided informal assurances that China is merely a way station for North Koreans -- assuaging any official fears about a permanent foreign refugee population -- it may well be possible to convince Beijing to cooperate in the relocation mission (or at least to look the other way as it takes place). Should it do so, many of the problems that Beijing seems to fear will vanish of themselves: if those refugees can be quickly processed by the United Nations refugee commission or similar offices, for example, Beijing need no longer worry about the risks imposed by a large, illegal population along its border with North Korea. Additionally, with United States leadership, Seoul and the United Nations lose their cover for ignoring the North Korean refugee crisis. The governments and organizations that have responded to the calamity in Darfur could also be rallied to the front lines for North Korean refugees. And, under the international spotlight, Seoul would be forced to observe its constitutional pledge of citizenship for all Koreans despite the current South Korean government's obvious reluctance to displease Kim Jong-il on any issue. Humanitarian rescue of North Korean refugees will also materially advance United States security interests. Mass defections from North Korea strike at the heart of the Kim regime, giving the lie to the myths upon which North Korean rule is based. This would further undercut the regime's authority and legitimacy, and force it for the first time to respond to the concerns of its subjects. A North Korean underground railroad is only a first step toward an entirely free Korean Peninsula, but a terribly important one. Bringing North Korean refugees to freedom will redound only to America's strategic advantage and will give tangible proof to the seriousness of this country's freedom agenda. America -- and any American president -- could take pride in such a legacy. URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: REFUGEES (92%); EDITORIALS & OPINIONS (90%); TERRITORIAL & NATIONAL BORDERS (75%); IMMIGRATION (75%); DEPORTATION (75%); ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS (73%); TREASON (69%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (65%); TORTURE (62%); TREATIES & AGREEMENTS (50%); JAIL SENTENCING (86%) Terms not available from NYTimes COMPANY: CNINSURE INC (93%) ORGANIZATION: INTERNATIONAL CRISIS GROUP (56%) TICKER: CISG (NASDAQ) (93%) PERSON: KIM JONG IL (93%) GEOGRAPHIC: SEATTLE, WA, USA (79%); BEIJING, CHINA (71%) NORTH CENTRAL CHINA (92%); WASHINGTON, USA (79%) NORTH KOREA (98%); CHINA (97%); UNITED STATES (94%); SOUTH KOREA (92%); ASIA (79%); NORTHERN ASIA (79%) LOAD-DATE: February 19, 2007 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH DOCUMENT-TYPE: Op-Ed PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 1112 of 1258 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final A Way With Words BYLINE: By LAWRENCE DOWNES. Lawrence Downes is an editorial writer at The Times. SECTION: Section 7; Column 1; Book Review Desk; Pg. 15 LENGTH: 869 words WHAT I KNOW FOR SURE My Story of Growing Up in America. By Tavis Smiley with David Ritz. 260 pp. Doubleday. $23.95. Tavis Smiley is a world-class talker. He got his start memorizing speeches by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., talked his way through high school, where he won speech contests and student council elections, kept talking in college, on the radio and then as the celebrity host of talk shows on Black Entertainment Television, NPR, PBS and Public Radio International. His Web site, naturally, is tavistalks.com. Smiley hasn't stopped talking since he got here, and his new memoir, ''What I Know for Sure,'' continues the conversation, filling in the back story of his 42 years, although with uncharacteristic bashfulness on one key point. Smiley says he hired a ghostwriter, David Ritz, to help write it, because ''I don't consider myself a storyteller,'' which is a strange thing to hear from someone so utterly full of speech. Ritz and Smiley give us nothing but story- telling, including page after page of supposedly verbatim dialogue from decades ago -- when Smiley was a year old, or in grade school, or even when he wasn't around to hear. Either the authors have the biggest collection of transcripts and tapes this side of the Nixon library, or they approached the project with a disturbingly easygoing attitude toward quotation marks. Smiley calls his book ''What I Know for Sure,'' but I wouldn't take that literally if I were you. You can be sure of this much: Smiley grew up in a trailer outside Kokomo, Ind., with his mother, stepfather and 10 siblings and cousins. His stepfather was an Air Force airman with an entrepreneurial streak, who enlisted the kids in a family cleaning service. Tavis was an extrovert from Day 1, and his mastery of King's speeches gave him the equivalent of his own speaking circuit at age 16. He decided early on that he was headed for great things. He faced serious obstacles, though, mostly having do with poverty and family discord. In the book's most affecting section, Smiley recounts the bloody beating his tightly wound stepfather gave him and his sister after church one day, when their preacher had accused the children from the pulpit (falsely, Smiley says) of having created a ruckus in Children's Church. The attack sends boy and girl to the hospital and into foster care, and makes Smiley's relationship with his parents terse and bleak for years. But Smiley wants you to be uplifted, so he offers his suffering as both a harbinger and a foundation of his success. He sees in himself a lucky blend of grit and the kind of ''hustle'' Pete Rose embodied on the Cincinnati Reds. His tale, told in a series of cliff-hanging chapters, follows a rigid structure: peak, valley, peak, valley and finally the summit of multimedia fame. It quickly becomes clear that the fuel propelling Smiley relentlessly upward is a fawning attraction to powerful people. He attends Indiana University but leaves before graduating to work as an aide to Tom Bradley, the Los Angeles mayor with whom he has become obsessed. Without embarrassment, Smiley shows us the pleading letter he sends the mayor after being turned down for an internship: ''No one -- no one on Planet Earth -- will work for you with the dedication and passion and enthusiasm I'm offering,'' he writes. ''If this letter looks smudged, those smudges are from the tears rolling down my face.'' He gets the job. He gets promoted. But then he quits after losing his ''autonomy'' to a deputy mayor whom he bitterly belittles as a ''30-something white boy from Harvard.'' After losing a run for Los Angeles City Council, Smiley becomes a radio commentator. He is named by Time magazine as one of 50 leaders of the future; he joins but is later fired from BET after being accused of disloyalty; he joins and then leaves NPR, which he scorns as ''a private club for educated white people.'' At BET, he is insulted on-air by Russell Simmons. He survives a bad romance. He travels to Cuba and meets Fidel Castro. Smiley is on top of the world these days, and it's poignant to see that even now he still cares what Time once thought of him, because he is arguably a bigger phenomenon than that weary old ink-on-paper magazine. He is a great African-American multimedia star, with radio and TV programs, best-selling books, a production company, a philanthropic foundation and even a communications school named for him at Texas Southern University. He is rich and famous, and as he basks in the reflected glow of the great people he meets every day, he seems quite in awe of himself. However Smiley's story strikes you, as a tale of stellar achievement or a physics lesson in the buoyancy properties of limitless self-regard, he is without doubt a natural at what he does. Incessant talkers often reveal far more of themselves than they mean to, and silent readers of this book can fill in a lot of gaps. When you add up all the boasting, the relentlessly upbeat bromides, the breathless celebrity encounters and the earnest litany of injustices suffered and hurdles overcome, you get an entirely plausible, unwittingly honest portrait of a natural-born talk-show host, and how he got that way. URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: BOOK REVIEWS (93%); CHILDREN (89%); AFRICAN AMERICANS (78%); STUDENTS & STUDENT LIFE (77%); PRIMARY SCHOOLS (77%); PUBLIC BROADCASTING (76%); CELEBRITIES (76%); PUBLIC RADIO (76%); PROFILES & BIOGRAPHIES (75%); WRITERS & WRITING (90%); CAMPAIGNS & ELECTIONS (71%); FAMILY (68%); LIBRARIES (65%); AIR FORCES (63%); FOSTER CARE (62%); LITERATURE (76%); STEPPARENTS (68%) Books and Literature; Reviews COMPANY: BLACK ENTERTAINMENT TELEVISION INC (57%); CINCINNATI REDS (50%) PERSON: Lawrence Downes; Tavis Smiley; David Ritz GEOGRAPHIC: CINCINNATI, OH, USA (77%) INDIANA, USA (77%); OHIO, USA (77%) UNITED STATES (92%) LOAD-DATE: February 18, 2007 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: Photo: (Photo by Kevin Foley/PBS, via Associated Press) DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company 1113 of 1258 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Welcome to the Museum of My Stuff BYLINE: By CAROL KINO SECTION: Section 2; Column 1; Arts and Leisure Desk; ART; Pg. 30 LENGTH: 2001 words THREE years ago Mickey Cartin, one of Connecticut's biggest contemporary art collectors, began feeling dissatisfied. For years he had been a trustee at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, his hometown, and had given money to other museums. But he had grown frustrated with ''the general inefficiencies'' he perceived, from conflicts among trustees to a tendency to make creative decisions by committee. ''It was becoming more and more difficult for me to see how gifts that I was making were being used,'' he said in an interview. Then one day in 2004, Steven Holmes, the curator for Mr. Cartin's collection, happened upon an empty storefront just down the street from the museum. Three months and a $25,000 renovation later, Mr. Cartin had his own 4,000-square-foot exhibition space, where for a year and a half he mounted shows of work from his own collection, which ranges from coolly contemporary masters like Josef Albers and Agnes Martin to obsessive outsiders like Adolf Wolfli and Joe Coleman. ''I got a big kick out of doing this,'' Mr. Cartin said. ''It got a lot of people in our town talking.'' He has since vacated the space, but he continues to organize shows focused around artists he collects and admires, like a retrospective of Mr. Coleman's work that opened at the Jack Tilton Gallery in New York last September and is now at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. While he continues to donate money to museums, he wrote in an e-mail message, he is now ''much more inclined'' to support specific projects than the general needs of entire institutions. Mr. Cartin is not alone. In recent years, a growing number of private collectors have been opening all manner of exhibition sites -- from casual warehouse spaces to full-fledged museums -- to show off their holdings and assert their aesthetic views, often subsidized by enviable tax benefits. The trend has been hastened by an enormous flow of disposable income and an insatiable public interest in art (not to mention keeping up with the Joneses). And then there are the practical considerations: given that so many artists are now working on an outsize scale -- room-size installations or attention-demanding video art -- even a mansion doesn't really cut it as an exhibition space. Art-world savants like to point out that the United States has a long history of privately founded institutions, including colossuses like the Frick Collection in New York and the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pa. But not all are enthralled by the current explosion. ''The growth of these spaces has impacted tremendously upon public institutions,'' said Roland Augustine, president of the Art Dealers Association of America and a New York dealer. Because galleries and artists generally prefer to sell to museums, he explained, a collector who founds one may gain an advantage. It seems highly unlikely that in a century's time big institutions presenting a broad art-historical narrative will be eclipsed by small, idiosyncratic museums focused around a single collector's taste. But for the moment, this new crop of exhibition spaces suggests a power shift within the art world -- one that is leveling the playing field between collectors and museum professionals, driving up art prices and allowing wealthy private citizens an ever greater say in terms of how their gifts will be used. Not all of those citizens are forthcoming about their long-term intentions. In September the industrialist Mitchell P. Rales opened the semiprivate Glenstone Museum alongside his home in Potomac, Md., where he shows works by artists including de Kooning, Warhol, Pollock and Matisse in a Gwathmey Siegel building. Though Mr. Rales is believed to have a long-term public institution in mind, he has released virtually no information about his plans, and no one from his organization was willing to speak for attribution about the broad outlines -- something hard to imagine from the director of a new public art institution. Early next year the Los Angeles County Museum of Art plans to open a museum-within-a-museum -- a project largely financed and named for the billionaire collector Eli Broad that will integrate art from his vast collection and the holdings of his nonprofit art foundation with the museum's collection in a new building designed by Renzo Piano. The project seems to give a collector extraordinary leverage over a civic institution -- especially in view of Mr. Broad's current refusal to say whether his art will ultimately go to the Los Angeles museum. Also in a class by itself is Crystal Bridges, a new museum of American art for which Alice L. Walton, the Wal-Mart heiress, has been snapping up masterworks. Plans call for it to open in the fall of 2009 in Bentonville, Ark., with the aim of drawing art tourists to the locale where the first Wal-Mart was founded in 1962. Already she has raised the hackles of the museum world's old guard by buying Asher Durand's 1849 ''Kindred Spirits'' for $35 million from the New York Public Library -- a work some felt should stay in New York -- and offering $68 million for Thomas Eakins's ''Gross Clinic,'' owned by Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. (Local museums eventually outmaneuvered her.) Constructing what is, in effect, a museum to one's own taste may strike some as a vainglorious hobby. And those involved allow that seeing your beloved possessions enshrined this way is indeed good for the ego. ''Art collecting becomes an expression of self,'' said Allan Schwartzman, an art adviser who helped create the Rachofsky House in Dallas, a Richard Meier design for the collectors Howard and Cindy Rachofsky; and the Inhotim Center for Contemporary Art, a Shangri-La nestled in a Brazilian forest, for the mining magnate Bernardo Paz. ''It's a form of self-portraiture.'' Or as Marc Glimcher, president of the New York mega-gallery PaceWildenstein, put it, ''It's the world's most expensive MySpace.'' Among the most visible is the Rubell Family Collection, started by Mera and Donald Rubell, prominent Miami collectors of post-1980s art. Frustrated by the inability to see their collection all in one place -- ''We would actually travel to visit our own work in various exhibitions,'' Ms. Rubell said -- they moved it to a former Drug Enforcement Administration warehouse in Miami a decade ago. In 2004 they revamped and expanded their galleries and added a cafe and a Phaidon bookshop. Today their gallery space, open five days a week, is as large as that of the Whitney Museum. And some of the shows have been influential, like last year's ''Poles Apart,'' a show of paintings by young Polish artists that created considerable buzz among curators and collectors. Ms. Rubell said the gallery, along with its educational programs and library, is run by a nonprofit foundation whose purpose is to further exhibitions of the collection. The works themselves are owned by the Rubells. ''It gives us a lot of freedom in terms of acquisitions,'' she said. Most collectors who create exhibition spaces are likely to take a similar tack, said Andrew M. Grumet, an associate with the New York law firm Herrick, Feinstein who specializes in tax issues, wealth planning and nonprofits. The collector can write off the foundation's operating costs; if the foundation also owns the collection, any artwork it buys or sells is generally exempt from sales and capital gains taxes. Those who retain private ownership of the artwork, like the Rubells, may still be able to win tax-exempt status if they make a strong case that the foundation does more than just promote the art's market value. Which may be one reason so many of those foundations promote educational and art loan programs. (There are exceptions, like Mr. Cartin, who said he finances his exhibitions with after-tax dollars.) The Rubells' example has transformed Miami's art scene. In 1999 Martin Margulies set up a warehouse space to show his holdings of contemporary and vintage photography, video, sculpture and installation work; since then, many of the city's collectors have opened exhibition outlets, including Dennis and Debra Scholl, Ella Cisneros and Rosa de la Cruz. Most recently, the real estate developer Craig Robins, who rotates his collection between his various offices and properties, hired the Madrid-based architects Abalos & Herreros to create a more permanent exhibition site. ''I think it would be a very good exercise for me as a collector to think about the collection in a museum context,'' Mr. Robins said. To some, becoming a more public institution might spoil all the fun. Six years ago Carol and Arthur Goldberg founded an appointment-only exhibition space in an old furniture factory in Mount Kisco, N.Y. ''We decided in our final years,'' Mr. Goldberg said, ''that we'd like to see a lot of the art that we've had in storage'' -- art that includes work by Sol LeWitt, Louise Nevelson, Gerhard Richter and Kiki Smith. Each of the Goldbergs' shows has been organized by outside curators. By contrast, Kent and Vicki Logan, who built a 7,500-square-foot private museum next to their house in Vail, Colo., prefer to organize exhibitions on their own. Each year Mr. Logan, who calls the project ''one of my great passions,'' assembles a display drawn from their holdings of Warhol, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and others. In many cases, a separate space reassures collectors that their art is cared for in a climate-controlled setting -- one that also allows works to be shown to best advantage. Today these private spaces can also loom as plums for larger museums. The Logans promised their little institution, together with their house and a substantial portion of their collection, to the Denver Art Museum, along with $10 million for the museum's endowment and $5 million to maintain the property. On Feb. 24 the Art Dealers Association plans a panel discussion at the Museum of Modern Art on ''The Museum as Collector,'' and the competition posed by private collectors in today's market will definitely be on the agenda. Tom Eccles, the director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard, who will be the panel's moderator, is now something of an expert on private collectors' spaces, having recently opened a museum at Bard that was financed by the contemporary collector Marieluise Hessel and shows works from her collection. In some cases, he says, private collectors have put works out of reach of civic institutions. ''A collector can actually assemble a major survey exhibition -- buy all the works in a way that no museum could do,'' he said. But the bigger issue for museums, he and others contend, is price inflation -- which is easily fanned by collectors who covet works for their museums and can acquire without committee approval. Mr. Eccles observed that today, ''collectors feel they can contribute to the art world just like curators can, and they want to be players.'' For museums, that can be a double-edged sword. ''The old paradigm,'' said Mr. Logan, ''is, 'Give us your money and we'll do what we want with it,' and I don't think that's operative anymore -- the new philanthropy is activist. They'll say, 'I'm going to have a say in what the objectives are.' '' For today's museum directors, courting donors therefore involves a more delicate dance. ''A kind of entrepreneurial side of some philanthropy has emerged, I think because of the nature of how a number of people have made their fortunes,'' said Glenn D. Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art. Michael Govan, who took over last year as director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, agrees. ''You'll find a lot of people who don't even want to use the word philanthropy,'' he said. ''They want to use a word like 'investment.' '' In the meantime, Mr. Lowry said, ''It's a fascinating moment.'' In general, ''I think it's incumbent upon the institution to demonstrate its capacity to meet expectations.'' He added, ''But I also think a gift is a gift.'' Yüklə 4,36 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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