KNOWING BETTER

Many of your readers probably think Calendar is about the arts. The rest of us know better. We know it’s really about show biz, the yielding victim of its environment.

But what intrigues me is what Calendar thinks it is about and what it wishes to project to all its unsuspecting fans out there. I’m fascinated, for example, by the probable assumptions of some readers as they browsed through two March 8 articles.

Barbara Isenberg may appear to be writing about art, when she chronicles the rising fortunes of post-Warhol Warhols (“Super Market”). But she isn’t. Her very fetching work more appropriately should have appeared in the Business section.

And then the point of Martin Bernheimer’s clever piece may seem to be the glories of Machiavellian marketing (“The Greatest Show on Earth, Maybe”). Wrong again. Lurking behind all of that witty data about Pavarotti-Herbert H. Breslin Amalgamated is a deeper concern for the art of music. It’s important that we--and in this you can help us--keep these things straight.

Come to think of it, I’m surprised that The Times hasn’t yet invoked cosmic overtones in an extensive recognition of the irony in the passing, within such a short period of time, of two of our age’s most successful entrepreneurs, the “painter” Warhol and the “pianist” Liberace. If it happens, don’t put it in Calendar. Please.

WILLIAM THOMSON

Los Angeles