At Gaper’s Block,  writer Jason Prechtel has looked closely at the draft of the Chicago Cultural Plan and compared the proposals to the pointers offered by Richard Florida in his often-quoted  “The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life.” He writes that the initiatives offered by the plan advocate a growth of the Creative Class in Chicago neighborhoods but, he says, will ultimately drive out low income population with no “creative skill sets.” What most concerns Prechtel is the funding of cultural initiatives by the private sector, deeming the proposed Chicago Infrastructure Trust “mysterious” and finding the term “cultural infrastructure” too ambiguous.

Jeffrey Deitch, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, L.A., finally spoke to the Los Angeles Times, weeks after chief curator Paul Schimmel and all artists on the museum’s advisory board resigned. He defended his tenure at the museum and his close relationship to major millionaire donor Eli Broad,  but he did not speak on the record about the departure of  Schimmel.

The New York Times reported yesterday on the conundrum facing the inheritors of Robert Rauschenberg’s combine “Canyon.” Since the work features a stuffed bald eagle, the work cannot be sold because it would violate the 1940 Bald and Golden Eagle Act, a law enacted to protect the endangered specie. The Internal Revenue Service, however, has decided to appraised the work at  $65 million and, according to the Times report, is demanding that the owners pay $29.2 million in taxes. The complicated case will be decided next month when the work’s inheritors, the children of the late New York collector Ileana Sonnabend, meet with the IRS in Washington.