Louise T. Blouin MacBain, founder of one of the world's largest art magazine publishers, has established a new foundation that will support cultural development around the world through research and programming, the New York Times reports.

One of the early projects of the Louise T. Blouin Foundation will be to study the economic importance of the arts by holding forums at which artists, politicians, business leaders, and educators propose cultural policies. It also plans to endow a chair at a leading university to research the relevance of art to everyday life and the connections between the study of art and the study of perception and cognition. Through the interdisciplinary, international foundation, MacBain hopes to show how creativity benefits countries economically and culturally.

"The foundation launch for me is where my knowledge and passions all come together," MacBain, 46, said in a recent interview. Her interests in the arts and business first converged, she said, when she became a co-founder of Trader Classified Media in 1987 and built a business with more than four hundred publications in twenty countries. Her company, the London-based LTB Holding Limited, is a large art-magazine publisher and art-information provider. She has pledged $30 million to establish the Louise T. Blouin Center for Creativity in London and provide the first year's program budget.

The Blouin Foundation was officially inaugurated in New York City on May 2 with an awards ceremony honoring individuals for their contributions to creativity, including former President Bill Clinton; the Nobel peace laureate Elie Wiesel; and Clive Gillinson, managing director of the London Symphony Orchestra and the incoming executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall. Other award recipients are Gregory Colbert, the photographer who conceived of a "nomadic museum" that could be disassembled and moved; Robert Wilson, the theater and opera director; Anish Kapoor, an Indian-born British sculptor; Paulo Coelho, the Brazilian writer; and Dr. Richard Axel, a Columbia University medical researcher and Nobel Prize laureate.

The foundation's advisory board includes Gillinson; Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim Museum; the soprano Ren�e Fleming; and the contemporary artists Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Francesco Clemente.