“It was in 1999 or so that, eking out a living as a cartoonist and graphic designer, he suddenly felt compelled to write. The catalyst was a pre-Columbine American television report about a teenage boy arrested for shooting several schoolmates.”
Tag: 10.16.03
NY Phil/Carnegie Merger – An Ill-Fated Venture
The New York Philharmonic/Carnegie Hall merger was ill-fated from the start, writes Charles Michener. “It was never going to happen. As we now know, the whole farrago was cooked up by Sanford I. Weill, the megabanker who heads Carnegie’s board, and his counterpart at the Philharmonic, Paul B. Guenther. And for all the spin about the orchestra’s glorious return to the place where it flourished before its move to Lincoln Center in 1962, it seems clear that the scheme had nothing to do with nostalgia or concern for the public good. In keeping with the merger mania that has corrupted so much of the product delivered by our media and entertainment leviathans (General Electric, which owns NBC, has just added Vivendi Universal’s entertainment division to its list of household appliances), the deal was all about the bottom line.”
Growing Pains – The Morgan Gets Bigger
Charles Pierce, director of the Morgan Library in New York, has just moved into temporary offices while the library is being expandedIt’s now so common to see museums shut, turn into construction sites and reopen a few years later that one can easily assume that the whole process is that simple. Yet as I surveyed my new office, I realized how complex, unsettling, and even difficult the last three years have been. There were, as I learned only after we had started, four major challenges involved in our goal of remaking the Morgan Library.”