Over the past few years, Jerry Speyer and Katherine Farley have been quietly wielding philanthropic power in New York, and are now perhaps the most important couple to the city’s cultural life. Speyer was recently appointed chairman of MoMA’s board, and the two were major donors to the museum’s expansion programme (for which they also helped the museum negotiate important land acquisitions). Farley is deeply involved with the renovation of Lincoln Center, the performing arts complex on the Upper West Side, serving on a number of its boards. As president and chief executive of Tishman Speyer Properties, which own some of the most important real estate in the city – Rockefeller Center, for example, and the Chrysler and Lipstick buildings – Speyer is an enormously powerful real-estate baron, and has used this clout to muscle through such works as Puppy (2000), Jeff Koons’s oversize flower dog, which was shown at Rockefeller Center in partnership with the Public Art Fund. Farley is also at Tishman Speyer; she is a senior managing director at the firm and oversees the company’s business in all emerging markets. The couple are also private collectors, and own work by Robert Rauschenberg, Christian Boltanski, Frank Stella, Koons and others.