Byline: By danny hakim section: Section B; Column 0; Metropolitan Desk; Pg. 1 Length

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SUBJECT: MATTRESS MFG (90%); MATTRESSES (90%); CRUISES (87%); MARINE PASSENGER TRANSPORT (87%); FESTIVALS (85%); ALLIANCES & PARTNERSHIPS (76%); SPONSORSHIP (76%); NEW PRODUCTS (73%); FINANCIAL RESULTS (73%); CORPORATE POSITIONING (71%); BASKETBALL (89%); SPORTS (71%); CREATIVE WRITING (70%); HISTORY (68%); WAGES & SALARIES (63%); BOOK CLUBS (78%)
COMPANY: SEALY CORP (95%)
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TICKER: ZZ (NYSE) (95%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS337910 MATTRESS MANUFACTURING (95%); SIC2515 MATTRESSES, FOUNDATIONS, & CONVERTIBLE BEDS (95%)
PERSON: LAWRENCE J ROGERS (57%)
GEOGRAPHIC: VERMONT, USA (79%); NEW YORK, USA (70%) UNITED STATES (79%)
LOAD-DATE: March 16, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: TWO ICONS: Last week, Verizon donated the painting ''The Lineman,'' appraised at $2 million, to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. The 1948 photograph above shows Norman Rockwell, left, and John Toolan, the model for the painting, in Arlington, Vt. The painting was in a print ad for AT&T, a Verizon precursor.(PHOTOGRAPH BY NORMAN ROCKWELL LICENSING COMPANY)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

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The New York Times
March 16, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Twombly in the Land of Michelangelo
BYLINE: By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
SECTION: Section AR; Column 0; Arts and Leisure Desk; ABROAD; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 2087 words
DATELINE: ROME
YOU wouldn't know it from wandering around the crowded art fair in Bologna a few weeks ago, or from seeing Larry Gagosian's new gallery in Rome, where some of the moneyed, antiseptic air of the Chelsea of New York reaches the neighborhood around the Spanish Steps. But Italy has become the basket case of Western Europe.

So everybody says. It is still tourist heaven, of course, if you're not paying in dollars. In political terms, though, it's forever chasing its own tail. This winter the government, chronically geriatric, fell for the umpteenth time. Decades of festering indecision caused rotting garbage to pile up in the streets of Naples.

But then there's the contemporary art scene.

A new museum is under construction in Rome, nicknamed Maxxi, designed by Zaha Hadid. A museum opened not long ago in Bologna called Mambo. (Italians love their acronyms.) The Prada Foundation has just bought an exhibition space in the south of Milan; Rem Koolhaas will be that architect. And in the north of Milan there's Hangar Bicocca, a vast former Pirelli factory devoted to gigantic installations; Anselm Kiefer's, an awesome series of towers built of tottering concrete blocks, has justly become a pilgrimage site.

In Naples, Madre, a contemporary museum, does first-rate shows. Now it has a new place. So does the Maramotti family, which owns Max Mara, a clothing company. This winter the Maramotti children opened a foundation in a converted factory on an improbable stretch of loveless industrial and office buildings in Reggio Emilia to house the collection of their late father.

More is happening in Turin, where the Castello di Rivoli has long reigned as the premier museum of contemporary art in Italy. And after years of dawdling, Venice has recently turned its customs house over to Francois Pinault, the French billionaire who already has the Palazzo Grassi and says he will use them both to show off his collection. That's hardly the best way for any city to take up new art, but it says something about Italy that Pinault chose Venice over Paris, which wanted him.

To get perspective, I dropped in on Lorcan O'Neill, a dealer who moved from London to Rome several years ago and now runs one of the best high-end galleries in town. He's a lanky Irishman with a roster of big-name artists and a modest space on a side street in Trastevere. We sat in the back room, surrounded by stacks of the many art magazines published here.

''Foreigners feel free to make fun of Italy and complain that it's creaky and corrupt,'' he said. ''For whatever reason, they think it's charming to insult Italians, never mind that then they go off and buy Prada, eat Italian food and covet Ferraris.'' In terms of new art, he added, Italy is in some ways livelier than England, where outside London it's pretty much a wasteland.

So the art scene here is booming, I said.

He laughed at my ignorance: ''It's complicated. It would be bizarre if Italy didn't benefit like everyone else.'' He was talking about the global art boom being a tide lifting all boats.

Many public art institutions here are like the Italian government, he went on. They're dysfunctional. The state still thinks of culture almost exclusively in terms of antiquities, so that's basically where all the money goes, what there is of it, ''on top of which,'' he said, ''there's historically a very complex and often antagonistic relationship between the public and private spheres,'' which is why a city like Milan has no public museum of modern art, but it has all sorts of private initiatives by people who think they can get things done more efficiently. ...

I confessed to being, suddenly, a little confused.

''See for yourself,'' he said, giving me what you might call an Italian shrug and sending me off into the drizzly night.

''IT'S medieval,'' the veteran curator Germano Celant said. He's the Richelieu of contemporary art in this country. Now he sounded more like an avenging angel. ''All these different villages, city against city, museum against museum -- every institution is a one-person project; otherwise nothing happens. There's no structure, no official culture of expertise.''

A recent whirlwind tour of various contemporary art museums and collections, girded by the obligatory pit stops for bucatini, turned up plenty that's going on, much of it excellent. But Mr. Celant is right. Responsibility for contemporary art here clearly falls, as it long has, on regions and cities and, above all, on private entrepreneurs, who at least since the war have recognized that Italy's future prestige rests on its artisanal past.

But whereas the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate and the Pompidou have emerged in the United States, Britain and France during that time as the big institutions around which smaller museums and private foundations have arisen as complements and alternatives, there's no MoMA here. No cohesion. All dispersed energy. Talk over the years about accumulating a modern art collection out of the Venice Biennale -- a ready-made source that over decades, wisely culled, could have produced a first-class museum -- typically came to nothing.

So private collectors like Prada in Milan and Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin and regional museums like Rivoli have been left to pick up the slack, for which they're not really suited. The Italian tax system further burdens them. In the United States, collectors give to museums and earn a tax break. Not here. There's no guarantee that gifts will even be accepted. Francesco Semmola is a private art insurer I ran across one afternoon at the Bologna fair. With a tight smile fixed on his face, he told me he insures private Italian collectors and foundations but won't ever deal with the government. ''The sad reality is that most art in museums in Italy is not insured,'' he said.

He read my expression and gave me that same shrug.

Mr. Semmola went on: A university near Urbino, he said, which 20 years ago received an important library of thousands of volumes, has recently had to return the gift because nobody ever got around to unpacking the books. ''And also a very important collector of contemporary art died, and when his family tried to pay inheritance tax with part of the collection, nobody working for the state would dare say how much it was worth,'' he added. ''So the heirs kept the pictures, paid the tax, then sold the art at auction for vastly more money. Like I said, nobody in the state wants to take responsibility.''

Carlo Bach was wandering around the fair, too. He oversees Illy's art program, which commissions artists to design the company's coffee cups, then uses money raised through sales for scholarships for young artists and catalogs for art shows. ''In Italy, owners of big industries are connected with culture, even though there's no tax advantage, as in America, because entrepreneurs here love their country, and when they see the government losing the faculty to sustain art, they're inclined to do it themselves.''

Love or vanity. Credit them for doing something. I found Lia Rumma, who as a young collector opened a gallery in Naples in 1971, then a second one in Milan 18 years later. Her husband, Marcello Rumma, published art books and worked on groundbreaking shows. He died in 1970. ''I wanted to defend the legacy of my husband and open up Italy, as he had tried to do, to the international scene,'' Ms. Rumma said. At the beginning her gallery showed Minimalism and Conceptualism when they were nearly unknown here. Gradually she nurtured a coterie of young collectors.

''But the market can't substitute for what reallysustains artists, meaning museums, public support and recognition,'' she said. ''Prada and other private places substitute here for the state, but they will never take the place of public institutions.'' I mentioned Madre, the museum in her city, Naples, and she nodded.

''Yes, but one swallow doesn't mean it's spring.''

Turns out the country is full of fine but lonely swallows. The Fondazione Maramotti is a handsome homage to a serious, mainstream collector, Achille Maramotti, who may be excused if in later years, save for occasional works by Philip Taaffe, Peter Cain and others, he bought with somewhat less distinction. The rooms of early Kounellis and Pino Pascali and Manzoni and Pistoletto are lovely.

In Turin, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, working closely with Francesco Bonami (like Mr. Celant, he is one of Italy's celebrity curators), oversees a foundation that has staged a variety of world-class shows. Mrs. Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and her husband own a villa in town packed with art. ''When I started to collect and visited Germany and London, I was shocked to see contemporary Italian artists who were nowhere to be found in Italy,'' she recalled. ''The focus here on antiquity is a way not to be involved more in this moment. But I think things are changing.''

They clearly have changed in Turin, which had to redefine itself as Fiat floundered. ''The city realized that contemporary art was a way to build a new identity,'' she said, which is what helped to get the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art off the ground in the '80s, with backing by the Piedmont region. Rivoli occupies a Savoy castle perched outside Turin. The collection now totals maybe 300 works, mostly large installations, said Marcella Beccaria, the curator. Lothar Baumgarten has painted the walls of one room an electric blue and added bird feathers. Sol LeWitt did murals in another room. A show of paintings from the Hayward in London arrived the other day. About 100,000 people visit Rivoli each year.

''It's only recently that people in Italy have begun to recognize contemporary art as a cultural value, which other countries use, for economic purposes,'' Ms. Beccaria said. ''Italians have been slow to see there's a whole economic world out there that rotates around it.''

BUT Turin is one case, Rome another. The American artist Joseph Kosuth was riding the train one recent morning. He recalled moving here in the '90s. He liked having room to work and think, and, well, ''It was Rome.'' That's what Larry Gagosian has been saying, too. Never mind that skeptics think he's here to court Cy Twombly, the most lucrative expatriate.

''Larry came exactly not for the reasons people think but for the most banal reason,'' Pepi Marchetti Franchi, who manages Gagosian's gallery, insisted. ''When he first saw Rome long ago, he fell in love with the city, and now he can afford to be extravagant, and he thinks artists he's interested in will feel the same way about exhibiting here. It's not for the market. There hardly is any market.'' The gallery opened with an exhibition of Twomblys, by the way.

Whatever. Romance does account for much of Rome's attraction. It's what brought Cornelia Lauf here years ago. She was married to Mr. Kosuth. A veteran curator, she ticked off names of galleries like Monitor, Magazino, S.A.L.E.S. and 1/9, which have brought a fresh vibe to the city. ''It's definitely livelier,'' she said. She introduced Paola Capata, who runs Monitor. We met before a large floor sculpture in compartments filled with what looked like tools and hay: the work of Kostis Velonis, she said, pointing nearby to a young doe-eyed man in skullcap and baggy jeans.

He smiled hopefully.

''I can't say Rome is fabulous,'' Ms. Capata said. ''It's not like in Holland or France or Britain, where museums support their own young artists. But it's a good place to work, and in the last few years it has certainly started to change.''

Where it ends up will depend partly on Maxxi, the state's modern art museum. A building is under construction. Anna Mattirolo, who has worked in the government arts administration for years, directs it. She sat at a tiny table in the cafe next door and described how tricky it had been, over the years, getting Culture Ministry bureaucrats, steeped in older art, to approve contemporary acquisitions. But it has gotten better, she said. Attitudes are evolving.

But, I said, the government has collapsed. The building is half-built. There's no real budget to grow the collection. How can she be sure the next government won't quash the whole project?

''It's our culture,'' Ms. Mattirolo said. ''There's no point in fighting it. It's impossible to say what will happen. All I know is that if we call great international artists and ask them to do exhibitions, they will come.''

She added, ''This is Italy,'' and shrugged.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: ARTS FESTIVALS & EXHIBITIONS (90%); MUSEUMS & GALLERIES (90%); ART & ARTISTS (89%); FASHION DESIGNERS (88%); ARTISTS & PERFORMERS (78%); EXHIBITIONS (77%); CONSTRUCTION (74%)
COMPANY: PIRELLI & C SPA (55%); MAX MARA SRL (54%); CASTELLO DI UDINE (53%)
TICKER: PIL (LSE) (55%)
PERSON: LARRY GAGOSIAN (91%); ZAHA HADID (56%); FRANCOIS PINAULT (53%); MICHAEL MCMAHON (57%)
GEOGRAPHIC: ROME, ITALY (94%); LONDON, ENGLAND (79%); PARIS, FRANCE (77%) ITALY (94%); EUROPE (90%); ENGLAND (79%); UNITED KINGDOM (79%); FRANCE (77%); WESTERN EUROPE (73%)
LOAD-DATE: March 16, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Pepi Marchetti Franchi, director of the new Gagosian Gallery in Rome, looking at a work by Cy Twombly in an exhibition there.(PHOTOGRAPH BY MARCO DI LAURO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)(pg. AR1)

The Manica Lunga, or Long Sleeve, section of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, left, in Turin. Below left, the dealer Lorcan O'Neill at his gallery in Rome, where he handles a roster of name artists.(PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE CASTELLO DI RIVOLI MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART)

Far left, ''The Secret Life of Plants,'' a work by Anselm Kiefer, in the Maramotti collection in Reggio Emilia

below, the inaugural exhibition, ''Vertigo,'' at Mambo in Bologna.(PHOTOGRAPH BY MARCO DI LAURO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

(PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRIS WARDE-JONES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)(pg. AR26)
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The New York Times
March 16, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

For Foreign Investors, Profit Isn't Only Goal
BYLINE: By FRED A. BERNSTEIN
SECTION: Section BU; Column 0; Money and Business/Financial Desk; SQUARE FEET CHECKING IN; Pg. 24
LENGTH: 1058 words
BRIAN GOULDING recently moved with his wife, Majella, and three young children to Wilmington, N.C. ''It's gorgeous here,'' he said, referring to the region's temperate climate.

But Mr. Goulding also has a strong interest in the colder environs of northern Vermont and, specifically, the success of a new hotel at the Jay Peak ski resort, five miles from the Canadian border. If the hotel, expected to open next fall, succeeds, Mr. Goulding and his family, who are from Ireland, will be allowed to remain in the United States.

The Gouldings are among the beneficiaries of a program that grants foreigners legal residency in the United States if they invest in job-creating businesses. ''If, in two years, the project has delivered the employment to the state of Vermont,'' Mr. Goulding said, he will receive a permanent green card. ''If the project collapses,'' he said, ''I won't.''

But Bill Stenger, the president and chief operating officer of Jay Peak, doesn't see much danger of the project failing. At a time when bank loans are becoming harder to get, Mr. Stenger said he had received the money he needs to construct the hotel -- $17.5 million -- from 35 investors, all of whom are hoping to become permanent residents of the United States.

Under the program, known as EB-5, a foreigner receives a green card for investing $500,000 in a business in a rural or high-unemployment area. With currency exchange rates what they are -- the dollar has fallen sharply against the euro and British pound -- the required investment ''is very affordable to many foreigners,'' Mr. Stenger said.

To tap into that source of capital, Mr. Stenger formed an alliance with Rapid USA Visas, which has offices in Naples, Fla., and in London. The company's clients are looking to make their homes in the United States -- in many cases, as retirees in the Sun Belt. (Under the law creating the EB-5 visas, they need never set foot in the state where the money is invested.)

''It's win-win-win,'' said Steve Yale-Loehr, an EB-5 expert who teaches immigration law at Cornell University: the business gets capital, residents get jobs and the investor gets a green card.

The program hasn't always been a hit. In the 1990s, what was then the Immigration and Naturalization Service had a hard time keeping tabs on whether EB-5 investments were creating jobs. ''There were fears that the program wasn't achieving its intended purpose,'' Mr. Yale-Loehr said. But the agency, renamed Citizenship and Immigration Services, has since found a way to streamline the process by permitting entities outside the federal government, called regional centers, to screen investors and monitor job creation.

As a result, Mr. Yale-Loehr said, ''the EB-5 program has risen from the ashes.'' Of the 10,000 EB-5 visas available each year, 5,000 are set aside for investors in regional centers.

Altogether, there are 17 regional centers, Mr. Yale-Loehr said, and about that many applications pending. Mr. Stenger said he worked with state and federal officials to win ''regional center'' designation for the entire state of Vermont.

Right now, Mr. Stenger said, Jay Peak has room for about 1,800 guests; the new, 78,000-square-foot hotel building is part of a plan to nearly triple that capacity. The building will contain 56 one- and two-bedroom suites and one three-bedroom penthouse, Mr. Stenger said. There will also be a day spa, a Vermont country store, several restaurants and a ski rental center in the building.

Mr. Stenger is also planning another hotel and a water park, which will be financed by 150 EB-5 investors and which will help draw visitors year-round.

Jay Peak isn't the only resort to benefit from Vermont's regional center designation. At Sugarbush resort in Warren, Vt., about 60 miles south, an EB-5 program is being used to finance four new buildings. The first -- a 40,000-square-foot guest services center, containing stores, equipment rental facilities and space for children's programs -- will break ground this spring. Three condominium hotels will follow, beginning in 2009.

EB-5 investors have to show that the money they are using was earned legally. At Jay Peak, all 35 investors passed that test, according to Mr. Stenger, who noted that, in addition to Britain, there were participants from Canada, Mexico, Scandinavia and South Africa. His company, formally called Jay Peak Ski and Summer Resort, held the investors' money in escrow until their applications were approved by the federal government, he said.

Mr. Goulding, who is 48 and semiretired from the airplane leasing business, said he wrote his check last April and received his temporary green card six months later. He said that accounting and legal fees added about 10 percent to his $500,000 investment. He said he expects to receive a permanent green card in 2009.

AFTER five years, the partnership may choose to sell the hotel's 57 units as condominiums, paying Mr. Goulding his share of the proceeds. Mr. Stenger noted that unlike some businesses that have no tangible assets, the Jay Peak partnership will have the 57 units and the right to sell them. (Technically, each investor will own 1/35 of each one, Mr. Stenger said.)

''The Jay Peak investors appreciate that there's an exit strategy,'' said Douglas Hulme, the chief executive of Rapid USA Visas, who is based in Naples, Fla.

Mr. Stenger said Jay Peak's EB-5 program is expected to produce 2,000 jobs in the area, which ''is very meaningful for this part of Vermont.'' Some of the 2,000 are what the government calls ''indirect jobs,'' meaning they won't be at Jay Peak itself but at businesses in the surrounding area that will benefit from expansion at the resort.

Mr. Goulding has met with Mr. Stenger, and he said he is satisfied that Jay Peak is ''conservatively managed.'' And it was a good sign, he said, that when Jay Peak drilled for water for the new hotel, ''they hit a gusher.''

When the new hotel is completed, each investor will be entitled to two weeks' accommodations a year. Mr. Goulding and his family plan to spend those weeks skiing. ''Not having a huge amount of snow in Ireland, as in none, Jay Peak provides a wonderful experience,'' he said.

He won't be checking on the business.

''The beauty of an EB-5 for me,'' he said, ''is that I don't have any day-to-day responsibilities.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: FOREIGN INVESTMENT (90%); PASSPORTS & VISAS (89%); IMMIGRATION (89%); IMMIGRATION LAW (88%); JOB CREATION (88%); EMPLOYMENT GROWTH (88%); CURRENCIES (86%); CHILDREN (78%); HOTELS & MOTELS (77%); US FEDERAL GOVERNMENT (75%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (74%); RESORTS (73%); EURO (66%); EXCHANGE RATES (64%); BRITISH POUND (64%); CITIZENSHIP (50%); RURAL COMMUNITIES (50%)
COMPANY: CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS (51%)
GEOGRAPHIC: LONDON, ENGLAND (53%) VERMONT, USA (94%); NORTH CAROLINA, USA (92%); FLORIDA, USA (79%) UNITED STATES (94%); NORTH AMERICA (92%); CANADA (92%); ENGLAND (53%); UNITED KINGDOM (53%)
LOAD-DATE: March 16, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: The Jay Peak ski resort in Vermont is building a new hotel, renderings far left and below, with the help of foreigners participating in a federal program that grants legal residency in exchange for investing in certain businesses. Bill Stenger, near left, says that he has received $17.5 million from 35 foreign investors.(PHOTOGRAPH BY PAUL O. BOISVERT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

(PHOTOGRAPH BY RENDERINGS FROM JAY PEAK RESORTS)

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