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July 1, 2011
BAM and Barclays Center Strike Up Arts Partnership
WNYC
by Julia Furlan
Since The Times reported it, it must be news.
Grande jetés and encores may join the jabs and jump shots at Downtown Brooklyn's Barclays Center. The developers of the 18,000-seat arena announced on Thursday that they are looking around the corner to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) for arts programming.
Related coverage...
NY Observer, Bruce Ratner, Arch-Ironist
The Observer's Matt Chaban sees through the irony.
“I always like to put things that are a little bit ironic together. So here you have a place like BAM, which is a great contemporary-arts cultural institution, and then you have an arena, which, people think about sports and circus and so on. And then you put them together, and then I think you’ve got something special.”
Indeed, Mr. Ratner has been a master of irony through decades of development:
- He had a rapidly gentrifying stretch of Brooklyn declared blighted, and then condemned.
- He has acquired a taste for hip-hop.
- He gets the light touch from the newspaper of record whose headquarters he built.
- He lives in Manhattan.
- He hired, then fired, Frank Gehry from the Atlantic Yards project after a lifetime of developing blasé buildings.
- Ratner’s rats.
(If these are not exactly ironic, well, neither is a cultural institution putting on shows in a sports arena, either.)
CBS New York, Nets’ Barclays Center Announces Partnership With Brooklyn Academy Of Music
“From concerts to family shows, from college sports to boxing, and, of course, to Nets basketball, we have already confirmed more than 150 events per year and we fully expect to host more than 200 events annually,” said Nets CEO Brett Yormark. “It makes great strategic sense to align with our neighbor, BAM, and continue to bring the best of everything to Brooklyn.”
AP via Washington Examiner, NYC's new Nets arena announces arts partnership
BAM President Karen Brooks Hopkins said the partnership will give BAM the opportunity to work on a giant canvas.
NoLandGrab: Almost like building a neighborhood practically from scratch.
Posted by eric at July 1, 2011 10:23 AM