Comprehensive cultural plan to be formulated

From the NY Times:

New York City is looking to join Chicago, Houston, Denver and other major cities by passing legislation to create its first comprehensive cultural plan.

The legislation, which the City Council passed by a vote of 49 to 0 on Tuesday, requires the city to analyze its current cultural priorities, assess how service to different neighborhoods can be improved, study the condition of arts organizations and artists, and plan how the city can remain artist-friendly in a time of high rents and other economic pressures.

The bill was introduced by the council members Stephen Levin (Brooklyn) and Jimmy Van Bramer (Queens).

“Administrations come and go; cultural affairs commissioners come and go,” said Mr. Van Bramer, who is chairman of the council’s cultural affairs committee and majority leader. “What we want is to have this ongoing prioritization of arts and culture.”

Tom Finkelpearl, the city’s cultural affairs commissioner, said he fully supported the plan. “We went back and forth and back and forth on improving the bill and I have completely come around to the idea that it’s going to be great for New York,” he said.

“Even though I spend all my time out looking at everything in all the boroughs, it still only adds up to an anecdotal idea of what’s happening,” he continued. “Are there parts of the city that are not adequately served by cultural resources or are there imaginative ideas for getting cultural resources to those communities?”

The plan requires the city to find out what arts groups in the five boroughs want and need and to incorporate these recommendations in a plan to be submitted by July 1, 2017.

Queens Museum director appointed commissioner of Cultural Affairs

From the NY Times:

Tom Finkelpearl, the president and executive director of the Queens Museum, is scheduled to be named the cultural affairs commissioner by Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday, the mayor’s office confirmed, putting Mr. Finkelpearl in charge of a $156 million budget and making him the point person on the arts for a city widely considered the cultural capital of the world.

The appointment is in keeping with the new administration’s emphasis on the disenfranchised; in his 12 years at the Queens Museum, Mr. Finkelpearl, 58, has hired community organizers to professionalize outreach efforts and emphasized the diversity of the local immigrant population. (He frequently cites the 138 languages spoken in the borough.)

And his institution’s recently completed $68 million renovation was largely aimed at making the museum more inviting and connected to the neighborhood.

“Tom believes that art is for everybody, and has developed an exceptional record of fortifying the city’s cultural institutions across all five boroughs,” Mr. de Blasio said. “That’s exactly the kind of energy, leadership and creativity that we want.”

The appointment, to be formally announced on Monday at the Queens Museum, begins to shed some light on Mr. de Blasio’s plan for the arts. He succeeds a mayor who was heavily involved in cultural affairs, Michael R. Bloomberg, and who used his own wealth to advance the mission of many arts organizations. Mr. de Blasio’s profile on culture has been something of a mystery.

Finkelpearl allows panorama to be defaced for pipe dream

From the Daily News:

A gleaming "Silicon City" has risen in Queens, complete with a satellite campus of a top-tier university - but you'll have to squint to see it.

It is a pint-size version of a complex for tech innovation, rendered on a famous panoramic model of the city. Though small in size, the model is a nonprofit group's bid to push its big idea for transforming Queens: Bring a tech hub to Willets Point, the shabby warren of body shops near Citi Field that is poised for a huge city redevelopment project.

The Coalition for Change, clamoring to be heard, gave the Daily News an exclusive peek at its model, which will debut at the Queens Museum of Art today.

The museum's executive director, Tom Finkelpearl, said that adding the model to the panorama - built for the 1964 World's Fair - makes the group's concept "viscerally understandable, which is not the case on Google Maps."

Precedent, however, provides a bad omen: Only once before has the panorama featured structures that had not yet been approved, and that was for the city's failed bid for the 2012 Olympics.

Isn't the panorama supposed to show what's there NOW? Why is Finkelpearl allowing this? And why does that thing look like the Millenium Falcon?