Author
Gary Shteyngart
The future of New York is Queens. Easily the city’s most important borough, it is like a great sponge that soaks up the most industrious people in the world and creates a vibrant urban landscape that has long disappeared in Manhattan, where Chase branches and CVSes march up and down the blocks, endless symbols of corporate and suburban vapidity. From Jackson Heights to Kew Gardens (where I first came as an immigrant in the 1970s) to Bayside, Queens is where the future will be made and where the citizens of the future will be born. Queens is a temple to the true international working class, to their foods and pastimes, to their stubbornness and verve. Those of us who prefer the real world to the finance-driven and the virtual will find ourselves running to the nearest subway, and $3 later, steeping ourselves in the glory of reality.
chief curator, Guggenheim Museum
Naomi Beckwith
It’s 2055, and Gowanus Canal has a white sand beach. The Brooklyn Navy Yard is a casino, East Williamsburg boasts a Chanel boutique. The old Brooklyn artistic energy has moved to the Boogie Down Bronx, making it a vibrant center of creative gravity with new studios and performance spaces. The city has supported the development of a shared art space in the Bronx, bringing Museum Mile programming to the borough. El Museo del Barrio’s revelatory new building wins its Puerto Rican architect a Pritzker Prize. The latest edition of the Governors Island Public Art Biennial has now opened, this year with special support from SpaceX. Where there is upheaval, art follows.
Author
Min Jin Lee
In 2050, I will be 81. By that time, every building in New York City will be growing something. Rooftop gardens, basement mushroom farms, backyard chicken coops. New York has sunshine, water and a lot of talent. We will make use of it and build a city that teems with food and fosters friendship. Imagine meeting up with your neighbors for weed (not that kind) and gripe sessions; swapping homemade kimchi for homegrown tomatoes, applesauce for perilla leaves and gossip for gochujang. This is the retirement I want.
Musician and co-founder, Blondie
Chris Stein
As the art world grows ever more corporate and culture continues its slide into an anti-intellectual dumpster fire, we will start to see a cultural rebellion — the return of a 1970s and ’80s “New York Drop Dead” barbarism, and with it a movement of making art for its own sake.
Actor
Leslie Odom Jr.
In 2050, the theater is more vital and alive than at any time in recent memory. Astronomical producing costs led to a bubble burst more than a generation ago. The commercial theater, at least for now, is inhospitable. But theater is everywhere. Apartments, old public school auditoriums, former churches and virtually. Technological evolution means coffee shop pop-ups can achieve the kind of spectacle once reserved for one of the 41 official Broadway theaters.
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The post Notable New Yorkers on the City’s Arts Scene, 25 Years Out appeared first on New York Times.
