Former LA Councilman Joel Wachs now heads Warhol Foundation

One of the most important players in the arts world today used to be one of the most important politicians in Los Angeles.

It’s Joel Wachs – the veteran of 30 years on the L.A. City Council and the man who might have been mayor. He swung for that job three times and missed. After he’d struck out in L.A. politics, Wachs struck out for a new job in New York City.

He heads up the Andy Warhol Foundation.

Joel Wachs loves New York.

"I live across the street from Central Park," he says, "and I go outside every morning and there it is. And it’s like, 'Wow! What do I do today?'”

Wachs spent most of his life in Los Angeles. But you’d never know it to hear him wax poetic about his adopted metropolis.

"This city is so alive and so full of energy and there’s so many incredible things to do, that as much as I love L.A. and as much as I love what I did, I feel very, very happy that I’m here now and have this chance to do this. I wish everybody at a certain point in their life when they make a change that it would be as fulfilling as this."

The change came in 2001. Wachs had just lost his third campaign for L.A. mayor, when the phone rang. He’d served on the board of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for half a dozen years. The foundation needed a president.

"It was really a day or two after the mayor’s race," he says. "They called and said that we’d been searching for a year and looks like we found somebody. But before we offer the job, we thought now that the race is over would you be interested?"

He said yes in a New York minute. The Warhol Foundation supports cutting edge visual artists and exhibits. Wachs has an office in Greenwich Village with Warhol prints on the walls and Warhol biographies stacked on the desk.

"In politics, you’re raising money every day of your life," he says, "and here I get to give it away! And it’s so much more fun to give it away than to have to ask for it, I got to tell you. And to give it away for something that I am personally passionate about, is like a joy. I mean I would do this job for nothing. I love it!"

Joel Wachs insists he still loves L.A., which he calls “an incredibly great city” with a diverse creative community. But he says the arts don’t get the support they deserve from the government or the public. He says it’s different in New York, where a city income tax supports the arts and more.

"People really do value culture here," he says. "Culture is really important. It is absolutely integral to everything about this city, to its economy, into the quality of life, into just what people value and what people want."

His other complaint about L.A.: public transportation. Wachs says L.A. sees it as the way the poor, the young, or the disabled get around. And in New York?

"I have this little card here, now that I’m a senior." he says. "For $40 a month, I have unlimited use of every subway and every bus anytime of day, as many times a day as I want. And between walking, which is my very favorite thing to do in New York, and not driving, which is my second favorite thing about New York, and utilizing the public transportation system, which is safe and clean and reliable – as we say, it’s a 'mecheieh'. I mean, it’s really terrific."

Not so terrific, says Wachs, is the cost of politics, not just in his former home of Los Angeles but everywhere. He says he spent only 50,000 on his first L.A. City Council campaign. Now, you could spend millions.

"I’m sorry," he says, "but in the end, everybody’s a loser from that kind of a system. In the end, that’s the poison in the system. And the only counterforce to that is a system whereby everybody actually is involved and becomes knowledgeable and does participate and that the money in the campaigns can’t buy or aren’t enough to quiet down that informed participation."

Joel Wachs says he hoped the neighborhood councils he helped create more than a decade ago would bring about an informed Los Angeles citizenry. That hasn’t happened … at least, not yet. Wachs sighs – and lets the worries of politics 3,000 miles away fade.