‘Spoke’ Shops Spiking 02
9/11 Health Progress, Deadlines 08-10
Gale Brewer on Charter Revision 28
CONSPIRACY THEORIES, PARANOIA, AND SOME INCONVENIENT TRUTHS
Photo by Sydney Pereira
Sarah Carroll testifies at a Sept. 20 Council hearing a week before her unanimous confirmation as the new chair of the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
With Broad Support, Sarah Carroll OKed as Landmarks Chief Photo by Sydney Pereira
BY SYDNEY PEREIRA Sarah Carroll, executive director of the Landmarks Preservation Commission since 2014, won approval from the City Council on Sept. 26 as the agency’s new chair. Carroll, a 24-year veteran of the LPC who has spent much of her time in the agency’s preservation department, will replace former chair Meenakshi Srinivasan, who served in the post for four years and announced her resignation in late April. After resounding support from preservationists, architects, former chairs Robert Tierney and Sherida Paulsen, and a developer at a Council hearing on Sept. 20, her appointment comes as no surprise. Queens Councilmember Karen Koslowitz had told Carroll not to lose any sleep over the wait time between the committee hearing and the full Council vote. “I really am happy that someone with your experience at the LPC — someone who started at the ground floor and worked your way up through the years — is being put forward for the position,” Speaker Corey Johnson told Carroll at the Sept. 20 hearing of the Rules, Privileges and Elections Committee. LANDMARKS CHIEF continued on p. 26
October 4 – 17, 2018 | Vol. 04 No. 20
Öyvind Fahlström’s “World Map” (1972) illustrates the use of tin-pot dictators by multinational corporations to extract wealth and suppress dissidents.
BY SYDNEY PEREIRA When German artist Hans Haacke documented real estate moguls Sol Goldman and Alex DiLorenzo’s Manhattan properties in 1971, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s director objected, calling the piece an “alien substance.” A Guggenheim curator was soon fired for supporting Haacke’s works — which presented column after column, neatly arrayed, of public records that offered commentary on how Goldman and DiLorenzo hid their identities behind shell companies from tenants’ rights groups. No doubt Haacke’s works today could be reinvented to visually expose the landords of 21st century New York. But for now, Haacke’s depiction of real estate holdings from the mid-20th century joins 69 other works from 30 artists in the Met Breuer’s latest exhibition, “Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy.” The exhibition explores an “alternate history” — both in fact and fiction — of anxieties and paranoias that beset American society from 1969 through 2016,
just before President Donald Trump took office. The idea was born in 2010 when lead curator Doug Eklund happened upon a 1991 interview between John Miller and the late Mike Kelley — two artists featured in the exhibit. The line-up was chosen by 2014, to the delight of Eklund, who wanted to show that the nature of conspiracies, corruption, and American anxieties — both based in truth and otherwise — are not new in the era of Trump and so-called “fake news.” “What [the show has] wound up being is a kind of archaeology or reminder to people that these are not new issues,” Eklund said. “These are issues that have constantly been happening in a democracy between the Establishment and the voices that are [on the] outside.” Eklund said that 1969 was chosen as the starting point because, among other things, it was a time when conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination were blossoming and just a few years before CONSPIRACY continued on p. 5
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