World Cup Preparations in Carson City and Worldwide!

CCAI is busy at work framing a portfolio of seventeen fine arts posters by internationally recognized artists. The works which will be featured in "Goal 2010!," our summer CCAI Courthouse Gallery exhibition,* were created especially for the upcoming World Cup in South Africa. The teams representing the thirty-two participating countries are also making plans for the tournament. Below, reprinted in its entirety from the New York Times, is an article discussing the challenging training issues raised by the different altitudes of World Cup stadiums in the host country.

* Stay tuned for details in a post we're publishing tomorrow!

Preparing for Altitude From the Ground Up
By Jeré Longman

[Graphic from New York Times. Caption: "Chester Higgins Jr. "The mountaineer Brian Oestrike using altitude-simulation gear from Hypoxico, which is working with several national teams."]

The 32 teams participating in the World Cup from June 11 to July 11 will be faced with tactical decisions about altitude as well as soccer. Matches at 7 of the 10 stadiums in South Africa will be played at elevations ranging from 2,165 feet in the agricultural hub of Nelspruit to higher than a mile in Johannesburg.

Approaches to acclimation seem to vary as widely as playing styles. The United States will begin training Monday at Princeton University, altitude 98 feet. England will head to a camp in Austria at an altitude of about 2,400 feet, and Italy will soon gather at the ski resort of Sestrière at nearly 6,000 feet.

Some teams, like South Korea and Japan, are considering tents and masks that simulate altitude conditions. Others (Australia, Argentina and Brazil) seem to be relying primarily on a natural adjustment to the elevation by arriving in South Africa about three weeks before their opening matches.

Little research has been done on preparing soccer teams for playing at altitude. The effects of altitude can vary from individual to individual.

Jiri Dvorak, the chief medical officer for FIFA, the sport’s world governing body, said in February that altitude was “not an issue which will significantly impact on the players’ health or performance.”

Yet, teams clearly think it will be a factor. Even FIFA’s officially licensed World Cup video game takes altitude into account. Preparing will be an inexact science, experts said.

“If you look at altitude experts with experience with footballers, you have less than a handful,” said Michael Davison, a director of the London Altitude Centre, which is advising England and several other teams. “When teams look for advice to FIFA, it says the altitude issue doesn’t exist. They can’t let teams come back and say, ‘We’ve had two or three group games at altitude and this other team had one.’ It has to be seen as a level playing field.”

Ultimately, most teams will not be acclimating under optimal conditions, altitude experts said. Rather they will attempt to strike a balance between rigorous skill and fitness training, team building, playing warm-up matches at home and adjusting to the thinner air at the South African stadiums (except those along the coast in Cape Town, Durban and Port Elizabeth).

The United States will play all of its first-round matches at altitude — against England on June 12 in Rustenburg (4,920 feet, or 1,500 meters), against Slovenia on June 18 in Johannesburg (5,750 feet, or 1,753 meters) and against Algeria on June 23 in Pretoria (3,981 feet, or 1,214 meters).

The Americans played in those three cities last June at the Confederations Cup, which was also played in South Africa.

“The altitude wasn’t a huge factor,” midfielder Landon Donovan said. “As the tournament went on, it was easier.”

The United States considered a pre-World Cup training camp at altitude in Europe. After consulting with the United States Olympic Committee, though, the Americans decided to train for two weeks on the East Coast at or near sea level. They will play exhibition matches in Hartford and Philadelphia, then leave for South Africa on May 30.

The benefit of sea-level workouts is that athletes can train hard and recover quickly. At higher altitudes, where the atmospheric pressure is lower and the air is less dense, oxygen molecules are farther apart and more difficult to breathe into the vascular system.

“In order to build a good base of fitness, hard work is best accomplished without being at altitude,” said Bob Bradley, the United States coach. “You need to be at levels where you can push it and recover properly.”

On May 31, the United States team will arrive at its base camp, at about 4,755 feet, or 1,450 meters, between Johannesburg and Pretoria. The Americans will have nearly two weeks to adjust to the altitude — the minimum period required for effective acclimating, said Randy Wilber, a senior physiologist with the U.S.O.C. and an altitude expert who is advising the team.

In a soccer match, players can run from six to eight and a half miles. The effects of altitude lead to faster heart rates, less oxygen in the bloodstream and reduced power. An athlete participating in the United States-England match without first adjusting to altitude could experience a reduction of performance of 10 percent, according to the London Altitude Centre.

Arriving in South Africa early should allow a player to perform more efficiently in thinner air as the body begins to produce more oxygen-carrying red blood cells and as changes occur in respiratory capacity, Wilber said.

At Princeton, the oxygen saturation in the American players’ blood will be 98 to 99 percent, he said. Upon arrival in South Africa, it might dip to 94 or 95 percent, or even to 90 percent or lower if an actual match were played, he said. (An exhibition is scheduled against Australia on June 5.) Less oxygen carried by the red blood cells results in less fuel for the muscles.

As players adjust to altitude, oxygen saturation levels should return to 96 or 97 percent, Wilber said, sufficient enough “that acclimatization is positive.”

In South Africa, the United States considered using the “live high, train low” method popular with distance runners. The theory is that athletes receive the oxygen-boosting benefits of resting and sleeping at altitude and the maximum-capacity workouts possible near sea level. But this plan would have required players to be on a bus four or five hours a day, Wilber said, risking their recovery time and morale.

The United States also researched tents that simulate altitude by using a generator to pump in lower concentrations of oxygen. But research indicates an athlete needs to spend 10 or more hours a day in the tent to benefit from increased red-blood-cell production, Wilber said.

England has also decided against using the tents. Yet, said Davison of the London Altitude Centre, the English will have access to other altitude-simulation equipment from a New York company, Hypoxico, which is supplying a number of World Cup teams.

This could include breathing masks that also use generators to pump diluted oxygen. Japanese players will wear the masks intermittently for an hour a day while they watch television, Coach Takeshi Okada has said. The masks can also be used while exercising on treadmills. The Japanese federation said it was also using a room filled with reduced oxygen to carry out cardiopulmonary fitness tests on its players.

The South Korean federation said it had not decided whether it would use tents or masks. Mexico, meanwhile, hopes to gain an advantage with players accustomed to playing at the 7,200-foot altitude in Mexico City.

Some teams have curious strategies. France will have its base near sea level in South Africa, which could “dissipate all of the altitude training effect” the team will gain earlier at the French ski resort of Tignes, Davison said.

The Southern Hemisphere winter and low humidity could also affect performance in South Africa. Some teams are expected to place humidifiers in players’ rooms and to provide flu shots. But things could be worse. At least the World Cup is not being held in Bolivia, a hellish place for visiting soccer teams at an altitude above 11,000 feet.

“It’s not La Paz,” Bradley said thankfully.

Makiko Inoue contributed reporting from Tokyo and Choe Sang-Hun from Seoul, South Korea.

In the Arts, Bigger Buildings May Not Be Better

[With thanks to SB in Carson City for the tip, reprinted in full from the December 12, 2009 New York Times. Note that the Capital City Arts Initiative is an organization without walls, working with local agencies including the Carson City Courthouse, Carson City Library and Classy Seconds Thrift Store to develop and present public programs.]

In the Arts, Bigger Buildings May Not Be Better
By Robin Pogrebin

Within months of its opening in 1997, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao had given the language a new term and the world a new way of looking at culture. The “Bilbao effect,” many came to believe, was the answer to what ailed cities everywhere — it was a way to lure tourists and economic development — and a potential boon to cultural institutions.

Municipal governments and arts groups were soon pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into larger, flashier exhibition spaces and performance halls.

Now the economic downturn has reined in a lot of these big dreams and has also led to questions about whether ambitious building projects from Buffalo to Berkeley ever made sense to begin with. Some are arguing that arts administrators and their patrons succumbed to an irrational exuberance that rivaled the stock market’s in the boom years.

Organizations were “blinded by the excitement of what it would be like to have this great new facility,” said D. Carroll Joynes, a senior fellow at the University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center.

The recession, he said he believed, is not solely to blame for a recent wave of projects that have been delayed (like additions to the St. Louis Art Museum and the Cincinnati Art Museum); scaled back (like the new building of the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, N.Y.); put into question (the new Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center and the renovation of the New York Public Library’s main Fifth Avenue branch); or abandoned altogether (the expansion of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo).

In Mr. Joynes’s view, “The recession is exposing the weakness of a lot of institutions that were seriously overstretched” before it began.

“It’s exposing poor management and poor planning,” said Mr. Joynes, who is collaborating on a study of 50 cultural building projects completed from 1994 to 2008 and their planning processes. These were situations, he added, in which “nobody actually asked: ‘Is there a need here? If they build it, will they come?’ ”

Last month the University of California abandoned plans for a new 140,000-square-foot Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. The project, designed by the high-profile Japanese architect Toyo Ito, was intended to replace a smaller existing building that does not meet seismic standards, but also to do much more: with its towering windows, huge interior spaces and curvaceous steel exterior, it was destined to become “an icon for the entire Bay Area,” Berkeley’s chancellor, Robert J. Birgeneau, said in 2008.

Less than half of the $200 million needed to build the Ito design had been raised, from private donors and the university, and the new economic reality put additional fund-raising in serious doubt.

But the museum was worried about more than just construction costs. While new wings and buildings can lead to increases in both visitors and donations, at least at first, they can also be a major drain on an organization’s operating budget.

“What has been thought of as a short-term asset can be a long-term problem,” said Jonathan Katz, the chief executive of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies. “Facilities cost money to operate, and they deteriorate. The facility itself becomes a series of expenditures.”

Lawrence R. Rinder, the museum’s director, said the decision to build the Ito design came out of a “well-reasoned expectation” of what was financially possible before the recession. Still, he acknowledged, “the ongoing economic shock inspired us to evaluate not only the shorter-term capital campaign but also strategies for sustainable operation.”

The building, he said, would have increased operating costs 10 to 20 percent above the $8 million the museum now spends annually on all its operations. It is in the process of coming up with a “smaller-scale” plan for a new home, he added, which will probably cost about as much as the current building to operate.

Most arts professionals describe their building projects as born of necessity: they needed larger galleries to bring permanent collections out of storage; they needed audience amenities like larger restrooms and upgraded air-conditioning to draw ticket buyers; they needed a building that was up to current code. But some concede that it was hard not to be caught up in what Mr. Joynes called the “frenzy of building” made possible by the booming economy and spurred on by highly visible projects like Walt Disney Concert Hall, the expanded Museum of Modern Art and the new Alice Tully Hall.

“Museums, when they saw how much money other museums were raising, said, ‘Oh, we can’t miss out on this,’ ” said Terry Riley, a former head of the Museum of Modern Art’s department of architecture and design, who helped oversee that museum’s renovation by Yoshio Taniguchi. In many cases, he added, “it’s almost as though money drove the decision.”

Maxwell Anderson, the director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which finished a major expansion in 2006 and is now completing a 100-acre park, said that “in part, all of us have been watching how these projects are perceived.”

“There is a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses quality to museum building,” he continued.

The Dia Art Foundation, which once had big plans for a 34,000-square-foot, column-free space at the entrance to the High Line in New York — before losing a board chairman who was also its main benefactor in 2006 — announced last month that it would instead build a 25,000-square-foot space on the site of a former garage it already owns on West 22nd Street in Chelsea.

Philippe Vergne, who became Dia’s director last year, defended the original plans: “It was what the world was — more was more.” But the recession “forced us to slow down” and really consider institutional needs, he said. What the foundation wants now is a simple, utilitarian space that makes art the main event.

“I want the ambition to be for the program, not the building — not, ‘Let’s go big because we’re addicted to big,’ ” Mr. Vergne said.

The economic downturn has had this effect on a lot of arts organizations, said Adrian Ellis, the executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center and the founder of AEA Consulting, a leading arts consultant.

“Cultural buildings became the way in which cities articulate their identity and vitality — they were driven not by the artistic community but by a civic agenda,” he said. Now the economy is pushing organizations into “deep reflection about what their purpose is and how best to realize it,” he said — reflection that can lead back to an arts-focused agenda, and to a renewed concern about “protecting their capacity to take artistic risks.”

“When you overexpand, you limit your ability to take those risks,” Mr. Ellis said. “Although expansion is usually seen as a sign of health, it is not always a sign of vitality.”

Mr. Joynes, of the University of Chicago, said that his study of cultural building projects aimed to explore this issue. “Do you do many more ‘Swan Lakes’ and take fewer chances artistically because you have big bills to pay?” he asked.

Cultural agencies and foundations are also reflecting on the institutions they help finance, albeit in more practical terms.

“We have become increasingly concerned about the sustainability of organizations as a result of these building projects,” said Alice L. Carle, program director of the Kresge Foundation, which supports nonprofit organizations nationwide. Ms. Carle said her foundation had decided to prioritize “renovation and repair projects over new construction and large expansions.”

“We’re more interested in helping shore up what organizations have already built,” she said.

Many institutions, of course, managed to complete their big projects before the downturn, though some may be experiencing builders’ remorse. For example, the $461 million Carnival Center for the Performing Arts in Miami, designed by César Pelli — whose vision statement promised it would transform the city into “the cultural capital of the Americas”— ended its first year, in October 2007, with a $2.5 million operating deficit, thanks to low ticket sales and high operating costs. (It has been kept afloat with the help of a $30 million gift from a philanthropist, Adrienne Arsht, for whom the center has been renamed.)

In Chicago, the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies owes $43.6 million of the $51.6 million it borrowed for its new building on South Michigan Avenue, completed two years ago. The institute’s galleries are now open only on alternate Sundays and the second Thursday of every month, its Wolfgang Puck kosher cafe is closed, and 26 percent of the staff has been cut.

The institute had expected income from event rentals and catering to help with revenue, and still hopes to find organizations that want to share the space. “We counted on a whole lot of weddings, bar mitzvahs, private parties,” said Hal M. Lewis, who became president and chief executive of Spertus in July. “These have materialized with less intensity than anticipated.”

Mr. Lewis, who was not around when the decision to build was made, says it was well intentioned, but describes the result as “an operating model and a debt service that requires us to live beyond our means.” Much of his energy these days is spent on efforts to change that result, though he tries not to dwell on what might not have been.

“I wish my hair would grow back too, but I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it,” Mr. Lewis said. “Now I’ve got to go on.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 25, 2009
Because of an editing error, an article on Dec. 12 about building projects by arts institutions that have been delayed or canceled because of the economic downturn erroneously included one museum among those that have delayed plans to build additions. The Columbus Museum of Art says that while fund-raising has been delayed for its addition, the project itself has not.

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[graphic from The New York Times. Caption: "# Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects. A digital rendering of the canceled Berkeley museum’s exterior and pedestrian walkway."]

Robert Rauschenberg

obituary in the May 14 edition of the New York Times


"Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look."
-- John Cage


[image from a google search for 'Rauschenberg.']