Джоэл Уэкс: Политик, юрист и президент Фонда Энди Уорхола

American lawyer and politician

Joel Wachs (/'//w//ae//k//s/, wax; born March 1, 1939) is an American former politician and lawyer. He is the president of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in New York City. He was a member of the Los Angeles City Council for 30 years, where he was known for his promotion of the arts, support of gay causes, advocacy of rent control and other economic measures. The unmarried Wachs was a closeted gay man until he was preparing to run for mayor in 1999 at the age of 60.

Wachs was born on March 1, 1939, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the son of Hannah (Stahler) and Archie Wachs, a teacher. His father was a Jewish immigrant from Poland who ran a grocery and butcher shop. The younger of two sons, Joel "suffered from hay fever so severe that at the height of the ragweed season, his parents sat him in the shop's cold storage room, in a fur coat, to help him breathe". They moved to Los Angeles when Wachs was ten, where his family became wealthy with a chain of inexpensive ladies' clothing stores. He grew up in Vermont Knolls, between 79th and 83rd streets and Vermont and Normandie Avenue. He attended Horace Mann Junior High School and Washington High School, followed by the University of California, Los Angeles, where the "gregarious" Wachs When in Los Angeles, he lived in Studio City. The vote was 24,704 for Wachs and 14,898 for Potter. His victory was attributed in part to his opposing a multimillion dollar development in the mountains just north of Beverly Hills. At 33, he became the City Council's youngest member. In 1986, a redistricting move stripped Wachs of more than 90% of his old district, and put him into a new one that ran from his home in Studio City to Sunland Tujunga in the far northeast San Fernando Valley. He later described the turn of events as akin to a "Hollywood movie" He served for two years.

Wachs resigned from the City Council 2001 to accept the presidency of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. His last day on the City Council was September 28 of that year.

Wachs thrice ran for mayor of Los Angeles. In 1973, as a relatively unknown new city council member, he finished a distant fifth in a crowded primary in an election in which Tom Bradley eventually won his first term as Los Angeles mayor. In 1993, he finished third behind Richard Riordan and Mike Woo. He ran again in 2001 and finished fourth with 11% of the vote, behind James K. Hahn, Antonio Villaraigosa and Steve Soboroff.

Wachs was appointed vice chairman of a new National Task Force on the Arts, whose goal, he said, was "to put the arts and culture on the agenda of every city government as a mainstream economic and social concern". He said he spent one third of his annual $43,923 salary (in 1981) on works of art for himself. and was eventually demolished. He was the author of an ordinance that requires commercial developers to set aside 1% of the value of all projects over $500,000 for cultural and artistic projects—either spending the money on their own, or depositing it with the city for such use.

In 2001, Wachs resigned his council seat and moved to New York City in order to serve as president of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Wachs is nominally the chairman of the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. Wachs's salary at the charity is over $350,000 per year, which does not include generous expenses and a pension plan of approximately 20%. Although this is nearly four times the average salary for such a position, some have argued that the Warhol Foundation is unusually complex as well as being more influential than most similar organizations. In 2010, Wachs—in his Warhol Foundation role—protested the removal of a David Wojnarowicz piece from the "Hide/Seek" exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery. The foundation had supported the exhibition with a $100,000 grant. Wachs wrote to the head of the Smithsonian Institution (NPG's parent organization), G. Wayne Clough, on behalf of the foundation's unanimous board with the "demand that the Smithsonian restore the work to the exhibition or the foundation would reject any future grant requests". Wachs' letter said in part, "For the arts to flourish, the arts must be free, and the decision to censor this important work is in stark opposition to our mission to defend freedom of expression wherever and whenever it is under attack." There were no signs of reinstatement of the Wojnarowicz piece by the NPG.

"Wachs defied easy categorization on the council, emerging as a populist who railed against what he saw as insider dealing in City Hall and misuse of taxpayer funds. He also was a staunch advocate for the arts and for civil rights." He was known as a "moderate to liberal Republican" despite the fact that his mail on the subject was running heavily against it.

In 1981, Wachs called for mandatory separation of recyclable materials from regular trash before collection to cope with the city's "growing refuse disposal crisis".

Wachs successfully advocated for an ordinance change that would allow artists to live and work in commercially zoned districts.

Wachs cast the only vote against a city ordinance prohibiting minors from purchasing drug paraphernalia, saying in 1983 he did not think police officers should spend their time raiding head shops.

Wachs emerged as the sole City Council member who helped broker an agreement that enabled Police Chief Daryl Gates to resign his post in June 1992 and retire "in an orderly fashion" after a crisis occasioned by the March 1991 beating of Rodney King and the resulting riots—as well as the issuance of a final, critical report of the police department by the Christopher Commission. Wachs and Gates forged a bond of trust, it was said, when the councilman leaped to the chief's defense after the city Police Commission briefly removed Gates in the wake of the riots.

Wachs went to Sacramento in January 1984 to unsuccessfully argue with state prison authorities that Dan White, the San Francisco supervisor who had killed gay leader Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, should be moved out of Los Angeles County, where he had been paroled after serving five years in prison for the killings.

Wachs was credited with forging a 1997 deal with the developers of a downtown sports arena that lifted some of the onerous provisions that would have worked to the financial disadvantage of the city. In return for the concessions, he agreed to exempt the arena from a ballot measure he was preparing to require voter approval for any subsidized sports stadiums.

Wachs was an advocate for slow growth development and was one of the cowriters of Proposition U, along with Zev Yaroslavsky and Marvin Braude.

Wachs was known for his boisterous personality. When he was newly elected to the Los Angeles City Council, he distributed a mock ordinance that would supposedly have taxed all male residents on the size of their genitals. Occasionally he exclaimed "This is fun!" in the middle of a committee meeting. His colleagues described him as "a human guy, a lot of heart".

Wachs is portrayed by Benny Safdie in the film Licorice Pizza set in 1970s San Fernando Valley. In the film, Wachs's first mayoral campaign is a plot point.