ART boosters in Texas have long boasted that their state was a "third coast" of contemporary art in America.
Occasionally, Boston's contemporary art boosters do wonder whether the public will turn out in big numbers for exhibitions, and whether tourists will come.
But one thing the city's art boosters are not laid back about is their plan to make Tel Aviv's art scene, and Israeli artists in general, known to the world.
The curator and Internet-art booster Rachel Greene has come up with another suggestion: artists could use YouTube, like a supply store, slag heap or rag-and-bone shop.
She is a gregarious and gracious host ("Hi, I'm Dawn Kasper, thank you for coming!"), and a tireless art ambassador and booster, cheerfully explaining her work and answering the same questions over and over again, hundreds of times a day: "Are you sleeping here?" "Where do you go to the bathroom?" For the record, Ms. Kasper uses the public restrooms in the basement, a spot she visits often.
Uli Sigg, the Swiss Ambassador to Beijing, who was amassing a vast collection of contemporary Chinese art, became an avid booster and introduced him to, among others, Harald Szeemann, the curator of the 1999 Venice Biennale.
In addition to immediate financial benefit and value as a morale booster, New Deal art has left behind a precious legacy, an artistic record of the times.
Moving to New York City in 1925, Fisher met other black writers including Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Jessie Redmon Fauset, as well as the white literary celebrity Carl Van Vechten, a major booster of black arts and letters.
But Mr. Byrne, 50, is perhaps the finance world's biggest real-life booster of mixed martial arts, the combat sport that combines elements of wrestling, karate, Brazilian jujitsu and Muay Thai boxing.
Michael Spring, director of the Miami-Dade Cultheal Affairs Department, said the Knight endowments would serve as a "big morale booster" for those in the arts.
Robert Rosenblum, curator of 20th-century art at the Guggenheim, is an unabashed Rockwell booster.
