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tel/fax:
718.362.4784
Please note our new postal address when sending
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Brooklyn, New York 11217
About DDDB
Our coalition consists of 21 community organizations and
there are 51 community organizations formally
aligned in opposition to the Ratner plan.
DDDB is a volunteer-run organization. We have over 5,000
subscribers to our email newsletter, and 7,000 petition
signers. Over 800 volunteers have registered with DDDB
to form our various teams, task-forces and committees
and we have over 150 block captains. We have a 20 person
volunteer legal team of local lawyers supplementing our
retained attorneys.
We are funded entirely by individual donations from the community at large
and through various fundraising events we and supporters have organized.
We have the financial support of well over 3,500 individual
donors.
More about
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Shhhush. This is a Library!
The Times Sunday City Section has an article, An
Exhibition Notable for What’s Not There by Paul Berger on the Brooklyn
Public Library's censorship of the art show "Footprints:
Portrait of a Brooklyn Neighborhood". The article leaves out
an important fact about the censored portrait of DDDB's spokesperson Daniel Goldstein–which
is that he is a resident of the proposed footprint for the "Atlantic Yards"
project and a plaintiff on the federal
lawsuit challenging the use of eminent domain to build the project. The portrait
and other works were censored, er "absent," from the Public Library's
exhibition. According to the article:
...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.
After the decision to remove the works was reported on Feb. 8 in The New York
Observer real estate Web log, there were complaints. One Web log, the Gowanus
Lounge, called the omissions “self-interest and stupidity of the highest
order,” and the Web site of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn said
the library had “censored the vision of the show’s original organizers
and curators.”
In response, library spokesmen say that the show, which will run through April
21, is intended solely to portray the people, places and buildings that lie
within the 22 acres of the controversial Atlantic Yards project...
Well sure, of course the show's prupose was to "portray the people, places
and buildings that lie within the 22 acres of the controversial Atlantic Yards
project." (people lie?) A fine purpose. So certainly a painterly oil portrait
by artist Sarah Sagarin of Goldstein, one of those "people...that lie within
the 22 acres of the controversial Atlantic Yards project," would be in the
show as a "portrayal" of one of those people. But...
...Jay Kaplan, director of the library’s programs and exhibitions,
said the institution’s role is to document what is taking place in Brooklyn,
not to provide a platform for advocacy. He called the rejected painting of Mr.
Goldstein “hagiographic” and the arena-as-toilet-bowl a “political cartoon.”
“The library doesn’t take positions on issues currently being decided,” Mr.
Kaplan said. “That’s not censorship. That’s just a mission statement.”...
Huh? Shhhush, we're busy parsing all of this. Clearly Goldstein is a part of what
is "taking place in Brooklyn." And luckily we're not afraid of big words.
The portrait of Mr. Goldstein as "hagiography,"
as the Public Library calls it, is accurate only to the degree that the Public
Library's censorship has made it so.
As we said in our original
statement on the Public Library's censorship: A net of political fear
seems to be widening across Brooklyn.
Posted: 2.17.07
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