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September 27, 2012
Playing Ball in Brooklyn Arts
The Wall Street Journal
The Journal, which is not a development partner of Forest City Ratner, is still willing to do its part for the New York media's "Barclays Center Week."
Mikhail Prokhorov is making a name for himself in Brooklyn.
The owner of the Brooklyn Nets and his sister, Irina Prokhorova, have made a $1 million grant to the Brooklyn Academy of Music through the Mikhail Prokhorov Fund. The grant will be announced Thursday at a cocktail reception before the BAM 30 Next Wave Gala, as will the new artistic partnership the grant will support, the TransCultural Express: American and Russian Arts Today.
..."BAM is our next door neighbor in Brooklyn. Barclays Center arena is a five-minute walk," he wrote in an email. "They are strategic advisors on the cultural programming for the arena. What do good neighbors do? They hold a block party, they borrow sugar from one another and they collaborate on projects for the neighborhood, which is what we are doing."
NoLandGrab: Gotta hand it to Bruce. He chairs BAM's board to burnish his image, gets BAM to come out and shill for his boondoggle, and then gets Proky to pay them off. Well played, sir!
Related coverage...
Atlantic Yards Report, WSJ: Prokhorov. "successful businessman in his home country," gives $1 million to BAM
Well, there are various definitions of "good neighbors," and the construction of the Barclays Center has not been so neighborly. As for "successful businessman," in post-Soviet Russia, that covers a lot of ground, including common corrupt if not illegal dealings.
Charitable contributions, especially when accompanied by pleasant press coverage, help people forget that.
NLG: Yeah, if they're "good" neighbors, we'd hate to see bad ones.
Posted by eric at September 27, 2012 10:02 AM