The Con: Galleries Facing Squeeze by Office Space

Art galleries swallowed up by S.F. real estate boom

Downtown district transforming - dealers move or close up

Image 1 out of 10

A former display wall at the George Krevsky Gallery stands nearly empty after most of the artworks were packed up for moving. The gallery is one of several leaving the downtown building at 77 Geary St.

By Kenneth Baker

February 26, 2014 | Updated: February 27, 2014 8:06am

In another blow to San Francisco's ailing downtown gallery district, several prominent art galleries have received eviction notices - the latest casualties of the city's commercial real estate boom.

The George Krevsky Gallery, the Rena Bransten Gallery and Patricia Sweetow Gallery, all occupants of 77 Geary St., will be leaving soon to make way for their high-tech neighbor, MuleSoft, an Internet services company that needed to expand.

"We live in a tough neighborhood," Krevsky said, "at the intersection of tech and greed. It's impacted the world I've been working in passionately for 30 years."

Several other galleries in the downtown area had already been forced to go dark in recent months, prominently those run by Eli Ridgway, who has since moved to Wyoming, and Don Soker, with more than 40 years in the business.

The Togonon and Marx & Zavattero galleries, also former occupants of 77 Geary, were edged out by rent increases earlier. After searching for a year for a suitable address to reopen, Marx & Zavattero announced the end of its business.

Working from home

"I planned after 22 years to change the direction of the gallery, but not like this," Krevsky told The Chronicle three months ago. "I've talked to my peers in Chicago and Los Angeles, and they're facing some of the same challenges."

Like many other art dealers, Krevsky, who will conduct business from his Oakland home in the near term, sees the very nature of the trade changing, with the waning of an audience devoted to looking at art in person. "Ten years from now," he said, "traditional galleries will be a thing of the past. The auction houses and art fairs will have taken over, and the Internet."

Prospective buyers of contemporary art are increasingly focusing on the purchases as a speculative investment. Art promotion and sales via the Internet have spurred this development. So has the proliferation of art fairs, where galleries vetted by promoters, often on the basis of their business prominence, set out their wares in booths before throngs of strolling visitors. Over the past decade, art fairs have accounted for an increasing share of art commerce, nationally and internationally.

Auctions affect pricing

Meanwhile, auction houses in the United States and abroad have used competitive bidding to drive up prices of what's called blue-chip art to stratospheric levels, leaving in the dust the lower tiers of the art economy.

As far afield as Toronto and London, mid-level art gallery businesses face extinction by fast-growing, cash-rich enterprises hungry for office space in top locations.

"It's not just that you go out and look for another space," said Patricia Sweetow, whose 77 Geary St. mezzanine space will close by summer. "It's about access - will you reach a new audience? What does it cost? Art fairs give you access to an audience that doesn't depend so much on location, if you can pull it off and you're accepted."

Jim Adler of Adler & Co., the sole gallery with a long-term lease at 77 Geary, said: "We're going into our seventh year here. We had an understanding going in that we could extend our lease, and we were happy to do so. ... I'm really sorry that Rena (Bransten) is leaving ... but the landlord is not Darth Vader, and anyone who characterizes it that way isn't being completely fair. They were predisposed to want to keep a cultural mix in the building."

Growing company

MuleSoft's CEO, Greg Schott, said the company has been growing rapidly and had spread into vacant parts of the building, owned by Yale Properties of La Jolla, before being offered the chance to expand in an adjacent space. "It opened up the possibility to continue growing our company in the same building with people who are passionate about living and working in San Francisco," Schott said.

Some former downtown galleries have already sought refuge on more hospitable turf. The Jack Fischer, George Lawson and Catharine Clark galleries - several forced out of the other downtown art showplace hub, 49 Geary St. - relocated in the fall to the area just northeast of Potrero Hill, now known as Potrero Flats.

The Hosfelt Gallery, displaced more than two years ago from its now-demolished Clementina Street quarters, had already staked out the Potrero Flats neighborhood as a potential gallery hub. But as commercial rents surge in that area, too, Hosfelt and the others may again face the dilemma of whether to stay, relocate or do business another way. Artists in the once-affordable area similarly face a rent squeeze.

"I feel the rise of the art fair phenomenon has damaged the local brick-and-mortar gallery model more than gentrification," said Griff Williams, whose Gallery 16 is on Third Street. "Buyers increasingly flock to these mobile art malls to buy, negotiate and cajole, rather than visit and support the local culture in their neighborhoods. And, too often, galleries willingly turn their backs on their one true asset, their role as a gathering place for people and rigorous ideas."

New chief of L.A.'s MOCA: refocus on the artists

New leader says mission is to resurrect the emphasis on the artists

Los Angeles Times

January 26, 2014

Carolyn Cole, McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Philippe Vergne takes over as MOCA in Los Angeles looks back at a tempestuous period in which it lost board members.

New York --

There are diverse references to art in the office of Philippe Vergne, the man who will be the next director of Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art: a framed photo of artist Walter de Maria's "The Lightning Field," a glossy picture of a work by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, and a porcelain toilet plunger, signed "R. Mutt," a reference to Marcel Duchamp's 1917 "Fountain" - a porcelain urinal.

That last one is a joke from a donor, but the pieces give some indication of what Los Angeles will be getting in the director of one of its foremost art institutions - experience with artists in both Europe and the American West and a wry sense of humor that touches on even the serious subject of contemporary art. Oh, and a healthy dose of ambition.

"This is the artist's institution," said Vergne, 47, paraphrasing the founding principle of MOCA: "The Artist's Museum." "For me, it has to be the most innovative institution in this country."

Turbulent times

The French-born Vergne will arrive after a rocky period for MOCA in which Jeffrey Deitch, an ambitious former art dealer untested in running a museum, isolated artists and staff with his managerial style and the type of exhibitions he chose.

Currently the director of the Dia Art Foundation in New York, Vergne has a collegial reputation. With his floppy blondish hair, French accent and tall stature, he looks the part of a rising star in the art world.

Though he was chief curator and deputy director at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis before moving to Dia, Vergne said he has no plans to curate shows himself. Instead, he'll collaborate with curators, artists and board members to reestablish MOCA as it had been envisioned by its founders in 1979.

New York museum

"My role as a director is to enable curators to be what they are at the highest level. By doing that, you enable the artist," he said in his airy office in New York's Chelsea neighborhood. From Chelsea, he oversees operations at Dia:Beacon, the open, modern art museum built in a former Nabisco facility along the Hudson River outside the city, and is working to reestablish Dia in Manhattan in a building the foundation recently purchased.

Vergne was introduced to art by his mother, an art historian, and said that when he was young, seeing an installation by the German performing artist and sculptor Joseph Beuys as well as a Salvador Dali exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris helped open his eyes to the diverse potential of art. (The 1979 Dali exhibition was organized by the Pompidou's Pontus Hulten, who would become MOCA's founding director.)

But familiar as he is with Europe, Vergne said he appreciates how the Los Angeles art scene isn't oriented toward Europe in the way that New York is.

He knows Los Angeles and its art scene well. His wife, curator Sylvia Chivaratanond, is from Los Angeles, and the couple were married in nearby Topanga Canyon. Her family still lives near Calabasas, another L.A.-area town, and the couple take their 2-year-old son to L.A. frequently to visit his grandparents.

Vergne's first visit to Los Angeles was in 1995 to visit the artist Chris Burden in his Topanga Canyon studio. The first installation he curated at the Walker was by L.A. artist Mike Kelley, whose touring retrospective will open at MOCA on March 31.

Vergne said he's excited to revisit Kelley's "Pay for Your Pleasure," which MOCA acquired in 1988, when he arrives in Los Angeles, and grins a child's glee when talking about his favorite works.

Humor rocks

He even makes Los Angeles art jokes - when asked about the millions of Angelenos who have never visited MOCA, he said, "What are they, under a rock? And I'm not talking about LACMA," in reference to Michael Heizer's "Levitated Mass" at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a 340-ton rock positioned above a narrow walkway.

Catherine Opie, one of the artist trustees who resigned from MOCA's board in protest over Deitch's direction of the museum, knows Vergne from a residency at the Walker Art Center more than a decade ago. His personality and sense of humor puts artists at ease, said Opie by phone.

"He is incredibly gifted with being social, and his sense of humor, and he can talk to pretty much anybody," said Opie, who was on MOCA's search committee. Vergne will "be an artist-centric director," she said, and "restore the confidence of artists in L.A. that MOCA is a place to be excited about."

A first step in making MOCA more artist-centric would be to invite the four artists who resigned from the institution's board to rejoin it, said Cindy Bernard, a Los Angeles artist who co-founded MOCA Mobilization in 2008, when the museum came close to shutting down, as a MOCA watchdog of sorts.

Vergne hopes to strike a balance, enhancing MOCA's presence on the international scene while keeping in mind local artists and visitors.

But he'll do all of that alongside the staff and board members who make MOCA what it is, he said.

Institutional knowledge

"I need to work closely with the board and staff in place; they know the institution, they sustain the institution, and they carried it on," he said. "I need their expertise and their institutional history to make the right decisions."

It's his collaborative nature that is most striking to Yasmil Raymond, who worked with Vergne at the Walker Art Center, and then followed him to Dia, where she was appointed curator in 2009.

Vergne always tried to push the boundaries of contemporary art while not deviating too far from the museum's history, she said. He did that by talking frequently to artists, staff members and board members.

"Everything had to be questioned many times and debated, and that line of inquiry is wonderful," she said. "He was really trying to bring together both the vision of the artists and the mission of the institution."

But he has his work cut out for him at MOCA.

A year ago, MOCA was dealing with a series of financial problems. LACMA made an offer to take it over, and talk swirled about establishing partnerships with other museums. But in March the board announced it would remain independent and launched a fundraising campaign to lift the endowment to $100 million. The museum said this month that it had reached that goal and will proceed toward a new goal of $150 million.

Billionaire Eli Broad, one of MOCA's top donors, had been giving $3 million a year for exhibitions, but the five-year agreement in 2008 has ended. His own museum, the Broad, will open across Grand Avenue from MOCA this year.

The Broad will be free except for special exhibitions, while MOCA costs $12, though MOCA has said it is exploring the idea of adjusting its admission fees.

"I like the idea of free, but I don't know if everything should be free," Vergne said.

Art Auctions at Christie's--How It's Done

The Christie’s Auctioneer Jussi Pylkkanen on Working the Room

In November, you auctioned off a record-breaking $691 million worth of postwar and contemporary art in a sale for Christie’s. Is there a bubble in the art market? 
We used to see high prices for our old-master paintings. We sold
Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” here in London in 1987 for $40 million, 
which was a record at the time. Really, over the last five years 
we have seen a steady march toward high prices in postwar art. 
At the same time, new buyers are entering the market from the 
Middle East, Asia, Russia and elsewhere.

From the outset, how do you identify the right bidders 
in the room? 
It’s the glint in their eye, and intuition. It’s about the posture 
of the client, how they sit forward on the chair, how they 
make eye contact with you. As I look up, I know the four 
or five people that are definitely going to bid. Particularly 
at the top of the market, the stakes are very high, and 
you have 60 to 90 seconds to sell a very major work of 
art.

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And how do you keep them bidding?It’s a hell of a lot easier when you personally know the people that are bidding and you know, to some degree, how far they’re going to go, why they’re bidding and when they’ll stop bidding. Laurence Graff was bidding on Roy Lichtenstein’s ‘‘Woman With Flowered Hat,’’ and he stopped at $40 million. I looked at him and opened my hands; I knew he wanted to continue. He went all the way to $50 million. At $50 million, the gallerist Tony Shafrazi said, ‘‘Come on, you have to give him the picture!’’

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Jussi Pylkkanen Jude Edginton/Redux, for The New York Times

How did you know he would keep going? 
In that situation, the appetite to acquire that piece was significant. That’s when you have to pause and give the buyer time, because in their lifetime they may only have one opportunity to buy the masterpiece that they really crave. I know that sounds a bit extreme, but it’s true. Someone might have collected 40 or 50 good paintings, and when the one work that he wants more than anything else comes up for auction, the auctioneer has to be very sensitive to that.

How much do you think the auctioneer affects sale prices? 
It’s very difficult to judge, but I think that a good auctioneer can certainly bring 20 percent to the value of major works of art.

Now that you have such an international room of bidders, have you picked up on differences in the way people from different nations bid? 
Many of the key buyers will have homes in different countries, and they’ve studied in England or in France and live in the Middle East, or have made their businesses in Russia but live in London. I wouldn’t say that nationality is an indicator of how they bid. I think that’s something we presumed might be the case, but it isn’t.

In New York there’s a sense that the U.S. art collector right now is a net seller, while the Qataris and the Chinese are net buyers. 
When I first joined Christie’s, it was what we called the Three D’s — Death, Divorce and Debt — that drove sales, but that doesn’t really play such a large part anymore. The Middle East, Asia and Russia are getting into the Impressionist and postwar markets, and others — furniture, ceramics and silver — and buying very strongly. On the flip side of that, you have the great American and European collectors, whose tastes have changed. They’ve sold Impressionist to buy postwar.

Are the buyers collectors who want to put pieces on their walls, or investors who trade art like stocks? 
I’d say 90 percent are collectors who want to put works on the wall. In the late ’80s, there was a lot of speculation driven by finance houses enlarging their books by investing in art and so forth, but that was very different from the art world today.

All the anger with banks and Wall Street hasn’t really carried over to the art world. Why do you think that is? 
By and large, the art-buying public is very philanthropic. The other point to bear in mind is that Christie’s has many hundreds of thousands of clients, and not all of them buy Francis Bacon triptychs.

Another auctioneer once said, “The best art is the most expensive art because the market is so smart.” Is that true? 
I see it very differently.

Art Makes You Smart: Art Education with Sociology

GRAY MATTER

Art Makes You Smart

Alain Pilon

By BRIAN KISIDA, JAY P. GREENE and DANIEL H. BOWEN

Published: November 23, 2013

FOR many education advocates, the arts are a panacea: They supposedly increase test scores, generate social responsibility and turn around failing schools. Most of the supporting evidence, though, does little more than establish correlations between exposure to the arts and certain outcomes. Research that demonstrates a causal relationship has been virtually nonexistent.

A few years ago, however, we had a rare opportunity to explore such relationships when the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Artopened in Bentonville, Ark. Through a large-scale, random-assignment study of school tours to the museum, we were able to determine that strong causal relationships do in fact exist between arts education and a range of desirable outcomes.

Students who, by lottery, were selected to visit the museum on a field trip demonstrated stronger critical thinking skills, displayed higher levels of social tolerance, exhibited greater historical empathy and developed a taste for art museums and cultural institutions.

Crystal Bridges, which opened in November 2011, was founded by Alice Walton, the daughter of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. It is impressive, with 50,000 square feet of gallery space and an endowment of more than $800 million.

Thanks to a generous private gift, the museum has a program that allows school groups to visit at no cost to students or schools.

Before the opening, we were contacted by the museum’s education department. They recognized that the opening of a major museum in an area that had never had one before was an unusual event that ought to be studied. But they also had a problem. Because the school tours were being offered free, in an area where most children had very little prior exposure to cultural institutions, demand for visits far exceeded available slots. In the first year alone, the museum received applications from 525 school groups requesting tours for more than 38,000 students.

As social scientists, we knew exactly how to solve this problem. We partnered with the museum and conducted a lottery to fill the available slots. By randomly assigning school tours, we were able to allocate spots fairly. Doing so also created a natural experiment to study the effects of museum visits on students, the results of which we published in the journals Education Next and Educational Researcher.

Over the course of the following year, nearly 11,000 students and almost 500 teachers participated in our study, roughly half of whom had been selected by lottery to visit the museum. Applicant groups who won the lottery constituted our treatment group, while those who did not win an immediate tour served as our control group.

Several weeks after the students in the treatment group visited the museum, we administered surveys to all of the students. The surveys included multiple items that assessed knowledge about art, as well as measures of tolerance, historical empathy and sustained interest in visiting art museums and other cultural institutions. We also asked them to write an essay in response to a work of art that was unfamiliar to them.

These essays were then coded using a critical-thinking-skills assessment program developed by researchers working with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

Further, we directly measured whether students are more likely to return to Crystal Bridges as a result of going on a school tour. Students who participated in the study were given a coupon that gave them and their families free entry to a special exhibit at the museum. The coupons were coded so that we could determine the group to which students belonged. Students in the treatment group were 18 percent more likely to attend the exhibit than students in the control group.

Moreover, most of the benefits we observed are significantly larger for minority students, low-income students and students from rural schools — typically two to three times larger than for white, middle-class, suburban students — owing perhaps to the fact that the tour was the first time they had visited an art museum.

Further research is needed to determine what exactly about the museum-going experience determines the strength of the outcomes. How important is the structure of the tour? The size of the group? The type of art presented?

Clearly, however, we can conclude that visiting an art museum exposes students to a diversity of ideas that challenge them with different perspectives on the human condition. Expanding access to art, whether through programs in schools or through visits to area museums and galleries, should be a central part of any school’s curriculum.

Brian Kisida is a senior research associate and Jay P. Greene is a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas. Daniel H. Bowen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Kinder Institute of Rice University.

TRAVEL: Jerusalem, a Beautiful Photographed Film

Try using the link at the bottom of this comment to see a video on the City of Jerusalem.  Includes aerial photography, brilliant colors and stunning perspectives of a land few have seen from such vantage points.
For people who like to travel or just imagine the site that they may never see with their own eyes.

http://vimeo.com/15034110

Changing Your View of the World Through Art

by Kenneth Baker

October 26, 2013

The answer to a single question can confirm the significance of an art exhibition: Do you see the world differently - even for a moment - after visiting it?

"David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition," opening Saturday at the de Young Museum, passes that test. Golden Gate Park, half steeped in fog, never looked as symphonically green to me as it did after I exited the Hockney show.

Not only does he make vivid a startling range of green hues in landscape paintings, but his drawings - even those made on an iPad - continually probe for marks, textures and patterns to register nature's details.

That, at one level, may be the essence of observational drawing. The show's last rooms contain charcoal landscape drawings Hockney made outdoors, and inkjet enlargements of them, describing from five woodland vantage points "The Arrival of Spring in 2013 (twenty thirteen)" in Britain's East Yorkshire, where he has lived intermittently in recent years.

In making these images, Hockney worked without color - "of course, the Chinese thought you could get every color from black and white," he said in conversation at his Los Angeles studio - finding graphic equivalents not only for physical detail but for the changing play of light and shade across shifts in weather and time of day.

Careful viewers will find their eyes taking up that challenge unconsciously as they study the drawings. And responsive visitors' minds will carry the search for adequate graphic notation into the de Young's park surround. For a while, every branch and leaf will seem to trigger it.

The quandaries of pictorial representation have driven Hockney's whole career, of which "A Bigger Exhibition" samples only the past decade.

The confident execution of the first works we encounter makes it seem that Hockney never struggles. But he has included here something that deliberately contradicts that impression. The second large room at the de Young opens with a wryly labored watercolor on seven connected pages titled "The Massacre and the Problems of Depiction" (2003). The top six sheets, framed together, include a remake of Picasso's frankly terrible 1951 Korean War protest picture and backfired homage to Goya, "Massacre in Korea."

Abutting the watercolor at the bottom, almost like a label, is a separately framed watercolor image of a man shrouded by the tent of an antique camera pointed at "The Massacre." Hockney has somehow made the faceless photographer figure suggest a self-portrait.

The first-referenced "problem of depiction," of how to picture something, was Picasso's: He could not make style and sentiment connect in his politically motivated "Massacre" - he didn't even come close.

The second was Hockney's. He has not made his satirical picture justify the effort, no matter how facile, spent on it.

The third and fourth problems: how to reprise another master's work - as Picasso failed to do in this case. Hockney has made no secret of his competitive feelings toward Picasso. Having tried to undo pictorial art's obsession with illusions of deep space based on perspective geometry, Hockney naturally hopes to supersede Picasso, who did it first through collage and cubism.

Camera as symbol

Finally, the camera symbolizes yet more "problems of depiction," having resolved automatically certain difficulties of transcribing appearances and thus, in Hockney's view, locking us into a limited understanding of how seeing is experienced, as if we saw everything with a single eye, like a camera lens, rather than two.

He has tried by various means to unsettle that understanding - most dramatically through four nine-screen videos, "Woldgate Wood" (2011), which enfold visitors at the center of "A Bigger Exhibition."

But Hockney's main tactic in trying to break the complacency of vision and our thinking about it has been shifts in emphasis. These appear throughout the de Young survey.

Watercolor works

The show opens with a string of notional watercolors - self-portraits, still lifes, window views, followed by a chain of deft watercolor portraits.

Watercolor technique can become precious - think of John Singer Sargent at his most florid - but Hockney's is practical. He seeks the most resourceful solution to every descriptive challenge.

He shows us, incidentally, that a portrait succeeds not by being a good likeness of someone but by being a good likeness compared to other portraits whose truth we accept, for whatever reason.

Yet no trace of caricature enters the show until you round a second corner inside the entrance and see a series of landscapes Hockney painted in Iceland. Here he has resorted to all sorts of abbreviation and exaggeration to communicate the impact of what he saw, as if only overstatement could convey it.

The almost Fauvist color that enters many of Hockney's paintings of East Yorkshire may owe something to the blatant palette of the iPhone and iPad apps that he used to produce drawings.

Some of the iPad drawings displayed on large screens show us something truly new: computer playback of a drawing's formation, color by color, line by line. The decisions guiding the process may still remain mysterious, but seeing the process playing out - seemingly by itself - is even more like seeing through someone else's eyes than looking at finished representational art.

Hockney might seem an odd choice for the largest exhibition ever in San Francisco's Fine Arts Museums. But on at least two grounds it makes sense: The Bay Area has a deep history of interest in and production of figurative art, and Hockney's work has much to teach us about observation and depiction that links to the long history of art.

David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition: Paintings, works on paper and video. Through Jan. 20. De Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, S.F. (415) 750-3600.www.deyoungmuseum.org.

Kenneth Baker is The San Francisco Chronicle's art critic

Is Music the Key to Success? An Opinion Piece

OPINION

Is Music the Key to Success?

By JOANNE LIPMAN

Published: October 12, 2013

Some Excerpts from the longer piece:

CONDOLEEZZA RICE trained to be a concert pianist. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a professional clarinet and saxophone player. The hedge fund billionaire Bruce Kovner is a pianist who took classes at Juilliard.

Enlarge This Image

Anna Parini

Multiple studies link music study to academic achievement. But what is it about serious music training that seems to correlate with outsize success in other fields?

The connection isn’t a coincidence. I know because I asked. I put the question to top-flight professionals in industries from tech to finance to media, all of whom had serious (if often little-known) past lives as musicians. Almost all made a connection between their music training and their professional achievements.

The phenomenon extends beyond the math-music association. Strikingly, many high achievers told me music opened up the pathways to creative thinking. And their experiences suggest that music training sharpens other qualities: Collaboration. The ability to listen. A way of thinking that weaves together disparate ideas. The power to focus on the present and the future simultaneously.

Look carefully and you’ll find musicians at the top of almost any industry. Woody Allen performs weekly with a jazz band. The television broadcaster Paula Zahn (cello) and the NBC chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd (French horn) attended college on music scholarships; NBC’s Andrea Mitchell trained to become a professional violinist. Both Microsoft’s Mr. Allen and the venture capitalist Roger McNamee have rock bands. Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, played saxophone in high school. Steven Spielberg is a clarinetist and son of a pianist. The former World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn has played cello at Carnegie Hall.

Mr. Todd says there is a connection between years of practice and competition and what he calls the “drive for perfection. . . . . .  He adds that his cello performance background helps him work collaboratively: “Ensemble playing trains you, quite literally, to play well with others, to know when to solo and when to follow.”

For many of the high achievers I spoke with, music functions as a “hidden language,” as Mr. Wolfensohn calls it, one that enhances the ability to connect disparate or even contradictory ideas. When he ran the World Bank, Mr. Wolfensohn traveled to more than 100 countries, often taking in local performances (and occasionally joining in on a borrowed cello), which helped him understand “the culture of people, as distinct from their balance sheet.”

It’s in that context that the much-discussed connection between math and music resonates most. Both are at heart modes of expression. Bruce Kovner, the founder of the hedge fund Caxton Associates and chairman of the board of Juilliard, says he sees similarities between his piano playing and investing strategy; as he says, both “relate to pattern recognition, and some people extend these paradigms across different senses.”

Mr. Kovner and the concert pianist Robert Taub both describe a sort of synesthesia — they perceive patterns in a three-dimensional way. Mr. Taub, who gained fame for his Beethoven recordings and has since founded a music software company, MuseAmi, says that when he performs, he can “visualize all of the notes and their interrelationships,” a skill that translates intellectually into making “multiple connections in multiple spheres.”

Woody Allen:   Still, he practices the clarinet at least half an hour every day, because wind players will lose their embouchure (mouth position) if they don’t: “If you want to play at all you have to practice. I have to practice every single day to be as bad as I am.” He performs regularly, even touring internationally with his New Orleans jazz band. “I never thought I would be playing in concert halls of the world to 5,000, 6,000 people,” he says. “I will say, quite unexpectedly, it enriched my life tremendously.”

“I’ve always believed the reason I’ve gotten ahead is by outworking other people,” he says. It’s a skill learned by “playing that solo one more time, working on that one little section one more time,” and it translates into “working on something over and over again, or double-checking or triple-checking.” He adds, “There’s nothing like music to teach you that eventually if you work hard enough, it does get better. You see the results.”

That’s an observation worth remembering at a time when music as a serious pursuit — and music education — is in decline in this country.

Consider the qualities these high achievers say music has sharpened: collaboration, creativity, discipline and the capacity to reconcile conflicting ideas. All are qualities notably absent from public life. Music may not make you a genius, or rich, or even a better person. But it helps train you to think differently, to process different points of view — and most important, to take pleasure in listening.        

To read more, try this link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/opinion/sunday/is-music-the-key-to-success.html?pagewanted=2