Barack Obama, Hope (2008), inspired heated debate: Did it validate street art as a "museum-worthy" enterprise?
But five months after the Intrepid was awarded the shuttle Enterprise, museum officials have turned their attention from the end of the newly revamped pier to a parking lot on 12th Avenue, across the cacophonous West Side Highway.
With the blessing of Bret D. Schundler, the city's former mayor and the current Republican gubernatorial nominee, the city scraped together $2.87 million to complete construction of the museum, utilizing urban enterprise zone financing, donating federal grant money and floating $1 million in bonds.
Her great concern, after profit, was respectability: she called her enterprise a museum, not a waxwork show, and attracted the middle classes by calling it educational.
We have liftoff on the quest for more than $40 million of public financing for a new museum that would house Enterprise, the prototype for the space shuttles.
Today the museum is a flourishing enterprise, actively collecting and mounting exhibitions, and in touch with sister institutions throughout the world.
Subsidizing the arts from the national lottery, a major source of financing for opera, ballet, museums and other enterprises in Britain, is always a fraught subject because there is so much disagreement over what is a worthwhile project and because, especially in the film industry, money can be lost so easily.
But after NASA awarded the Enterprise to the museum in April, Intrepid officials decided to build an $85 million science and space museum there.
Ms. Marenoff-Zausner said the decision to give up the planes was "bittersweet" because it would help Intrepid accommodate Enterprise, which the museum's directors hope will be a big draw.
I don't have any objections to a Jack the Ripper museum, it's a commercial enterprise like the London Dungeon and Jack the Ripper walking tours, but what I'm miffed about is the fact that we seem to have been completely deceived, in a way that is rather unpleasant".
