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February 19, 2007
An Exhibition Notable for What’s Not There
The NY Times
By Paul Berger
The proposed Nets arena has been depicted as many things by opponents of the Atlantic Yards project, but a gigantic, shining toilet bowl is the most eye-catching critique to date.
The artwork is one of more than 50 works that appeared last fall in an exhibition, “Footprints: Portrait of a Brooklyn Neighborhood,” at Grand Space, a community center in Prospect Heights.
But last Tuesday night, the 70 or so visitors to the Brooklyn Central Public Library on Grand Army Plaza, where the exhibition is beginning a new life, did not see that item. Nor did they see about a dozen other works that had been on display at Grand Space, including a collage called “Target” of the area near the Atlantic Yards site, and a portrait of Daniel Goldstein, the spokesman for Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, a group staunchly opposed to the project.
Those works are absent because the library judged them too partisan or too abstract for its purposes. The decision has led to a debate over censorship that is as spirited as the battle over the project itself.
NoLandGrab: The library's response was that the Goldstein portrait was "hagiographic" and the toilet collage was a "political cartoon."
Yesterday, NoLandGrab spotted hagiography at the library's exhibit and Atlantic Yards Report stumbled over a political cartoon that must have gone over the heads of the censors.
Posted by lumi at February 19, 2007 6:29 AM