Hello everyone, welcome to the Art of the Mooc. We are here with a very special guest, Tom Finkelpearl, commissioner of culture in the city of New York. Thank you, Tom, for taking time in your very, very busy schedule. >> My pleasure, thank you. >> And we are here to have a short conversation about many of the topics in this module of the Art of the MOOC. Generally, the course as students know, is about public art and experimental education. But today, we will focus more on special politics and public definitions of public art more broadly. And you know so much about this topic. You've published on it and you practice it in your various professions in your career. And so, the first question has to do with your most recent book. In the last few decades, public art has transformed itself in all kinds of directions. And one of the more debated ones is what people call socially engaged art, social practice, or relational aesthetics, there's dozens of terms that have been used. But in your book, you have very strong arguments for the idea of cooperation, or the art of cooperation. Can you tell us a little bit about that argument, why you think it matters to use this term? >> When thinking about how to talk about the topic of the book, I was looking broadly at this interactive participatory art. And I think one of the biggest problems with this kind of art, in general, is it over-claims. It's like, we're solving the world's problems. It's like, eh, maybe not. Or, this is some kind of really in-depth, collaborative process. Well, guess what? The author still remains the artist, at some level, in many projects. Admit, some more than others. So what I wanted to do is find a term that I believed in that didn't over-claim. And so all of the projects, in fact, almost every project you imagine that's social, that some of it's cooperative. So I came to the term, which is a relatively modest term. And I feel if you read the book or you understand what these projects are, you believe, well, maybe it's gone beyond cooperation to something truly collaborative. But at the same time, I got really interested just in the idea of cooperation. And I started reading game theory, and sort of this theory of cooperation, and reciprocity, and the philosophical underpinnings, etc. So I did all this reading for several years, and actually ended up not including any of it in the book. >> [LAUGH] >> I think it was really great that I didn't include it, because I don't know enough about it. I'm actually an expert, I believe, in public art and cooperative or collaborative art, but not in the theory of cooperation. But I do think it's an incredible sort of new area of research. I was running a program at the Department of Cultural Affairs in the 90s and it was the Percent for Art Program. Percent for Art is when the city built a building, 1% goes to art. You hire an artist, you do a project. And some of the most interesting work on those project was the process. You're out in the community, you're out in Bed-Stuy or you're in Harlem or you're in Rockaway. And there's this really interesting set of dynamics between different communities, stakeholders, and the artist, and the city agencies. And as I saw this unfolding, I realized, if that's the most interesting thing, then there are also artists for whom that's the art. And they embrace that idea of the process and the interaction and the communication and the social dynamics. So that was something I got interested in. I had been involved with artists like Mierle Ukeles, the great artist-in-residence at sanitation department, here in New York City, for years. So my first book was about public art, and it was about a lot of those commissioned works. And then the second book, [COUGH] was involved in what I felt was the most interesting part of the first book. And it coincided with a time when a lot more attention was being paid to this sort of socially engaged, political, interactive, participatory practice. >> Right, but it makes a big difference whether there's a sculpture in a public square or social processes that are ongoing. And one of the topics that we bring up in various other conversations we're having with our guest presenters, but also in the core lectures, is this idea of the paradox of permanence, how we assume that sculptures last forever, but social processes are ephemeral. And many of the contemporary artists and policy makers who care about this type of work are trying to solve that apparent contradiction, right? How do you deal with that in your work when you, say, work with artists or and you're more or less commissioning things, this idea of relating in an ongoing matter with a particular constituency or population? >> Well, I think that when you talk about sort of on long-term or permanent public art, one of the things you have to understand, it's constantly changing, even if it is permanent. So I actually like the idea of creating bricks and mortar monuments. >> Mm-hm. >> And one of the things I also love to look at is the kind of decontextualized monuments. So sometimes you're in a Polish community, or you're in a community that used to be a Polish community, so you see the Pulaski Bridge in Green Point. It's like, where are the Polish people? Maybe now it's a African American or Latino community. But it gives a kind of residue of history. >> Mm-hm. >> So it's constantly changing in a very slow arc. >> Yeah. >> I don't think that the expression, you never step into the same river twice. >> Mm-hm. >> The public art projects are constantly in flux because of social change. And so one of the things that New York City is particularly in flux because of immigration, I worked at the Queens Museum. Queens is a place where 65% of household heads are immigrants, the average immigrant in New York City has been here for ten years or less. So you have this constant change. So one of the things we've been able to do here since I became commissioner is that the city decided under this administration to issue the municipal ID card. It's the IDNYC. And so with the ID card, all you have to do is prove that you are Pedro, that you live in New York City. And you can prove that on the basis of documents that you have. And so let's say you are undocumented, it doesn't matter, as long as you have a Con Ed bill and maybe an ID card from where you're original country. So the problem with that kind of ID card, which has been experimented with in other cities, is that the uptake hasn't been that high, and it becomes almost a scarlet letter. Like, hi, I'm undocumented, here's my ID card. >> Mm-hm. >> So we instituted a cultural benefit. We went to our partners. Which is 33 cultural institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum, Carnegie Hall, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Queens Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the zoos, and the gardens. And we said, what can you do? And they said we will offer a one-year free membership to anybody who holds that card. So you get the card, and you can go out and become a member of Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center. And that's been a tremendous success. Right now, already, 250,000 people have the card. >> Wow. >> We could get many, many hundreds of thousands, I don't know the exact number, but it's going to be way more percentage-wise than any other city. And the ID card benefits, for those cultural benefits, have already exceeded 20,000 people. >> Yeah, that's a fantastic example of how culture and politics are so deeply intertwined, right? >> Mm-hm. >> An ID card that has many other functions. It's- >> Yeah, but the other thing is I see it as kind of a social project, and I'm not an artist. I'm not doing this as an artist or anything like that at all. But it's the kind of thing I think, so where you put arts and culture together with this big municipal project. And it has the advantage of making the card better, but it also opens the doors of those cultural institutions. >> Yeah, yep. >> And I was talking to the director of a major cultural institution, I said, well you know this is a way to democratize culture in a way. But you're probably going to get mostly those other folks who got the card for the cultural benefit. He said, no, I really want to make sure that every undocumented person who got the card for that reason, also knows they're welcome at my institution. >> Mm-hm, mm-hm. >> The metaphor that comes to mind is the Tower of Babel. >> Mm-hm. >> And I think that the city is divided by language. >> Wow. >> And that's something we really want to address here. That first and foremost Spanish, after that Mandarin, and then Russian, by the way, quite interestingly, is the next language. So I know that there are parts of the city where people don't know that this agency exists. >> Right. >> They're putting money into this agency >> Yeah. >> And they don't know that we're here, they don't know that we're a resource. I've been to areas, and the biggest problem is, sort of the newly arrived communities where there's not good English. >> Right. >> So we need to spend the time, if we're one city, we need to have representatives of our agency who can go out there, speaking the languages. At the Queens Museum, when I arrived, there was nobody in the upstairs staff aside from maintenance and security who spoke Spanish as their first language. And so we changed that, and then by the time I left, we had staff that spoke five Chinese languages. Plus Hindi, and Spanish, and Farsi, and French. But actually maybe first and foremost then, in Corona also was important not to just have Spanish speakers, by the way, but also we had Mexican, Dominican, Puerto Rican. >> Right. >> Peruvian and Columbian staff members. >> Mm-hm, mm-hm. >> So nothing is perfect, but that just on the basic level of communication, seems to be the first step.
