Around 8 years ago I was puzzled to see scaffolding wrap the entire
edifice of the International Center for Photography (ICP) on Fifth
Avenue and 94th Street, about a five minute walk from my apartment.
Was the museum, one of my favorite, being refurbished behind the
metal cocoon? Nearly every museum in my neighborhood on the Upper
East Side, where I am blessed to live at least for the time being,
goes through expansion or remodeling from time to time.
I soon learned that the ICP had moved to midtown, something I found
inexplicable. When a museum moves out of its long-time headquarters,
something seemed deeply wrong, especially when I learned that some
unnamed party had bought the building in order to turn it into his
private mansionan act I found barbarian.
In this week's Nation Magazine, in a very good article on the "wealth
gap" in New York by Gabriel Thompson, I finally learned the identity
of the barbarian who purchased the ICP building. It was Bruce Kovner,
a Jewish-American hedge fund manager who earned $715 million two
years ago. Kovner is also one of the major funders of rightwing think
tanks and journals in the U.S.A., including the American Enterprise
Institute (AEI), the Manhattan Institute and the New York Sun. With
such lavish sums at his disposal, Kovner decided to purchase yet another home:
>>The "upside" of income inequality is best considered from above:
for example, with a view from the fifth floor of Kovner's mansion
overlooking Central Park, which he purchased in 1999 from the
International Center of Photography for $17.5 million. With the
infusion of another $10 million in renovations, the structurewhich
had contained two floors of gallery space, the museum school and
officeswas transformed into his private fortress. In the basement is
a rare-book vault, where Kovner presumably keeps copies of an edition
of the King James Bible that he financed, with a price tag in excess
of $20,000 per volume. Other vantage points from which to assess the
benefits of growing income inequality in a clear-eyed fashion might
include Kovner's 200-acre estate in Millbrook, New York, or his
twelve acres of linked oceanfront properties in Carpinteria,
California, which he purchased last year for $70 million in what the
Wall Street Journal called "among the largest U.S. residential
real-estate deals."<<
According to a profile on Kovner that appeared in New York Magazine
(more below), the mansion features a two-story bedroom, a media room,
a basement library to house his collection of rare European
illustrated books, eighteen bathrooms, and one bidet. Since Kovner is
supposed to be single, one wonders why he would feel the need for 18
johns. I guess he is a very shitty person.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/06/15/bruce-kovner-capitalist-pig-of-the-month/
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