By Benjamin Sutton, artnet Tom Finkelpearl, the new commissioner of New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA), believes artists can save the city. And he’s making news. Last week his department launched CultureAID (Culture Active in Disasters), a program conceived in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. A collaboration with the city’s Office of Emergency Management and FEMA’s Sandy Recovery Office, the initiative aims to formalize the essential role artists and arts organizations played in relief efforts after Sandy in anticipation of future disasters. In the lead up, Finkelpearl sat down with artnet News to offer a wide-ranging look into how he was approaching his new job, including thoughts on CultureAID, creating a more expansive vision for arts funding in New York, the Department of Cultural Affairs’s contribution to the city’s proposed new Municipal ID Card, and more. ARTISTS TO THE RESCUE! “I have a place in Rockaway, and I witnessed what happened after the storm first-hand on a day-to-day basis, with Occupy Sandy and Klaus Biesenbach bringing materials down there, and the Rockaways Surf Club, all of which was incredible, there was all this volunteer work going on,” Finkelpearl, the former director of the Queens Museum who began his job as culture commissioner under mayor Bill DeBlasio in April, told artnet News recently. “The Queens Museum did a very quick benefit on behalf of the Rockaway Waterfront Alliance and raised $65,000 in four weeks. But what was needed was not $65,000, it was $65 billion. So these billions and billions of dollars are what was necessary, and it pointed to me the difference between community action—and a lot of community action was done by artists and arts groups—and government action. Both are extremely important, and community action by the artists was very psychologically valuable, just this idea that some hipsters are showing up on your front porch saying, ‘We’re here to help.’” CultureAID will make it easier for artists and arts organizations to help, both with disseminating disaster preparation information and in relief efforts. The initiative is emblematic of Finkelpearl’s approach, which he honed during his 12-year tenure as the executive director of the Queens Museum. He sees artists and cultural organizations as vital not only for the economic benefits they bring to the city—a popular argument for arts funding during the Michael Bloomberg era—but also because of the integral roles they play in their communities. MORE THAN MONEY “The city has been extremely good at measuring the economic impact of the arts, and I believe it, I really believe it,” Finkelpearl says. “Tourism is important to the economy, and arts are important to tourism, and it’s measurable, and that case has been made quite well. The counterargument to that is: Nobody got into the arts because it’s good for the economy. You got into the arts because of a particular artistic experience, the intrinsic rather than the instrumental value of the arts. The instrumental is that it’s good for the economy, and the intrinsic is that something happens that’s not measurable when you’re at the ballet or looking at a painting. The problem with making the economic argument is, if you’re basing your entire argument on that and you say, “We should build a new museum because it’s good for the economy,” well, it might be more advantageous for the economy to build a stadium. And I’m not saying I agree with that, but there are other things you can argue for economically that might be just as good or better than the arts. So therefore we have to look at what’s inherent in the arts. But in between there is this idea of the social value of the arts, this idea that art is good for communities, which I really believe and I’ve seen in Queens. And that’s something we want to focus on and think about as well. Because when you’re making the argument for the economic value, you’re essentially making the argument for the big Manhattan institutions. And again, I believe it, and we should support them. But when you make the social argument, you’re making the argument for community-based institutions.” Part of championing and promoting the work of neighborhood arts groups beyond Manhattan means approaching the role of his department in a more complex way. Two thirds of the $156 million in funding that the DCA distributes go to the 33 members of the city’s Cultural Institutions Group—which includes the Metropolitan, Queens, Brooklyn, and other major museums, as well as smaller groups like the Bronx County Historical Society and Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning—and the remainder is split among some 1,000 organizations. Visiting with as many of those groups as possible is a big part of Finkelpearl’s community-based approach. Or, as he put it, “We fund around 1,000 groups; if I went seven days a week and went every day to a different group, it would take three years just to visit the ones we’re already funding, and I think we’re not funding a lot of groups in New York City that we should be funding, so that’s one of the challenges here.” Click below to continue reading the article online.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 18:58:05 +0000
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