The Art the Brooklyn Public Library Doesn't Want You to See

The censors officials at the Brooklyn Public Library have decided that some art from the Footprints show can't be shown at the library. Is it gay-themed art or something overtly sexual? Nah. Just a depiction of Atlantic Yards as a toilet bowl, a portrait of Develop Don't Destroy's Daniel Goldstein and that sort of thing. The Library issued a bizarre statement explaining that they're publicly-funded when The Real Estate asked them about the censorship the choice they made to exlude six works. That's Donald O'Finn's censored excluded work to the right. (Horrifying, isn't it? Are those turds floating in the crapper?) You can see the portrait of Daniel Goldstein that that Library won't show here and one of Amy Greer's photos here. (You can see DDDB's statement here.)

Censorship, particularly crass and brainless politically-motivated censorship, is one of our hot button issues. We could even vaguely understand if they were keeping something awful and offensive from their walls, but they're not exactly trying to spare the people of Brooklyn a depiction of the Virgin Mary surrounded by little vaginas and dung. No, this is self-interest and stupidity of the highest order. The Library, in its statement to The Real Estate, even vaguely tries to blame local gallery owners and artists for participating in the decision as part of a "selection committee."

In deciding to ban these works, the Brooklyn Public Library is behaving like a little village library in 1980s Transylvania refusing to show a portrait of Nicolae Ceausescu wearing one of those funny noses with eyeglasses and mustache. Actually, we're overstating the case--the backwoods Transylvanian Communist censors would have had a better excuse, either because they were true believers or because they were afraid of being dragged out into the forest by the Secret Police and shot for mocking Ceausescu. The people at the Brooklyn Public Library, on the other hand, are said to not want to offend Bruce Ratner as they are trying to suck up to him do some fundingraising development work so that he'll bankroll their floundering BAM Cultural District project. (Perhaps as a follow-up they can block internet access to DDDB and other websites that are deeply critical of Atlantic Yards. It could be worth an extra four or five hundred G's, minimum.)

Guess this means the "Free Speech Zone" installation the library hosted in 2004 was only an abstract idea? Well, yes, actually. The BPL has had some censorship issues with actual books in the past. For instance, this case, which made waves in September.

You can say we're overreacting or that our knee just jerked up, but our opinion of the BPL has fallen because of this. On the positive side, we haven't had a case of Brooklyn art censorship to mock and rant about in a while, and we haven't been able to invoke Nicolae Ceausescu in a blog post before and truly miss writing columns about police state East Bloc countries, so in that sense the library has our gratitude.