Month: April 2005

Early Music Promoter Laurette Goldberg, 73

“A tireless organizer, performer and advocate for early music, Ms. Goldberg probably did more than any other individual to establish the Bay Area as a center for historically informed performance. Through her teaching and institutional work, she helped create a close-knit community of early music devotees and made the Bay Area a magnet for such enthusiasts worldwide. Her greatest legacy is San Francisco’s Philharmonia, which she founded in 1981 and led through the first five years of its existence.”

Is Damien Hirst The End Of An Era? (Thank God!)

Jerry Saltz hates Damien Hirst’s new show of paintings. “In the end, Hirst is just another symptom of the hype, the hubris, and the money that have swamped the art scene lately. I love that weirdos and gypsies are rewarded in the art world. But Hirst and the many others who are currently riding the whirlwind aren’t weird at all; they’re official pitchmen and -women. Hirst’s show merely brings us a step closer to the end of this profligate period. At his glitzy after-party, in an enormous tent on the roof of Lever House—amid dancing models, reveling stockbrokers, and the same successful artists and art world showboats you see at every one of these events—I thought I heard the Drums of Destiny on the horizon.

Saul Bellow, 89

“Bellow was the most acclaimed of a generation of Jewish writers who emerged after World War II, among them Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick. To American letters, he brought the immigrant’s hustle, the bookworm’s brains and the high-minded notions of the born romantic.”

Mona Lisa Gets A New Home

The Mona Lisa is changing rooms at the Louvre. “Leonardo da Vinci’s 500-year-old masterpiece will be hung alone on a wall in the museum’s Salle des Etats. It will give the millions of people who come to see the Mona Lisa every year a better view of the painting. The Salle des Etats has had a 4.8m euro (£3.29m) renovation to provide a suitable home for the masterpiece.”

Official: Some Non-Profits A Hotbed Of Tax Evasion

The IRS says that some non-profits have become a “hotbed of tax evasion and abuse.” Congress is threatening action. “The findings have already sent alarms through the nonprofit community. Last month the industry-convened Panel on the Nonprofit Sector offered a preliminary report on how laws could be tightened and practices improved to curb abuse. In some cases fraud and abuse are committed by the nonprofit itself, such as when a charity is established to benefit its main donor; in other cases, the nonprofit acts an enabler for tax-shelter promoters, such as when a municipality or union takes a fee to participate in a deal that allocates “profits” to it and losses to wealthy individuals.”

Satellite Radio Is Changing An Industry

Satellite radio is gaining traction. And as it gains credibility, it i changing the programming landscape. “Total subscribers at XM and its competitor, Sirius Satellite Radio, will probably surpass eight million by the end of year, making satellite radio one of the fastest-growing technologies ever – faster, for example, than cellphones. To keep that growth soaring, XM and Sirius are furiously signing up carmakers to offer satellite radio as a factory-installed option and are paying tens of millions of dollars for exclusive programming.”

The Summer Blockbusters – Managing The Risk

“The summer movie release schedules show around 25 “major” productions poised for release – most on a near-simultaneous global rollout, to foil the pirates – at an average cost, we’ve worked out, of $85m. It must be remembered that actual box-office takings are now a minor part of a film’s income-generating potential: it’s taken as read that individual movies now act as a brand, developing ancillary products from soundtracks to video games to DVDs that – if all goes according to the business plan – will far dwarf what cinemagoers themselves fork out. The pressures to get it right are now so huge that one thing is clear: Hollywood is deeply reluctant to get involved with anything that hasn’t already proved itself.”

When All Of The Knowledge Of The World Comes Together

We’re in a new era of globalization, writes Thomas Friedman. “We are now in the process of connecting all the knowledge pools in the world together. We’ve tasted some of the downsides of that in the way that Osama bin Laden has connected terrorist knowledge pools together through his Qaeda network, not to mention the work of teenage hackers spinning off more and more lethal computer viruses that affect us all. But the upside is that by connecting all these knowledge pools we are on the cusp of an incredible new era of innovation, an era that will be driven from left field and right field, from West and East and from North and South.”