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NY Times, April 7, 2019
In a Playground for the 1 Percent, an Arts Center for the Rest of Us
By Gina Bellafante
By now you know that Hudson Yards probably isn’t your jam.
The reviews have come in and they have been categorically negative. You
have determined that the next time you want a $10 million apartment or a
Tank watch from Cartier or a pile of lentils topped with superfoods at
Sweetgreen, you will go to the other locations in Manhattan that supply
these things and don’t require the use of the 7 train.
You have, however, admittedly, always felt a subversive thrill engaging
the utterly generic experience in New York City — sitting at the bar of
a chain hotel, going to the mall. But now there are plenty of malls in
New York and you have been to them — to the Time Warner Center, the
Oculus, Brookfield Place, to City Point. You know what it is like to
bear the enormous expense of living alongside the global ruling class
while playacting that you are in White Plains or Paramus.
Many of the stores and restaurants in Hudson Yards opened several weeks
ago and they are predictably filled with affluent-looking foreign
tourists. And then there is the Shed, an ambitious 200,000-square-foot
cultural center for the visual and performing arts that is opening this
weekend, with much hope invested in the notion that it will serve a
broader population.
The building means to set itself apart from the arid glass and steel
towers in its proximity. Designed by the firm of Diller Scofidio +
Renfro in collaboration with David Rockwell, the Shed is a low-rise
structure encased in a quilted retractable shell that slides back and
forth on enormous wheels, allowing for the expansion of theatrical space
as well as the provision of metaphor — a rare sense of mobility and
accommodation in an expansive development otherwise defined by the
stagnancy and self-isolation of elites.
Observing the Shed from the High Line, you see that it emerges from the
orifice of a soaring building, filled with offices and condominiums. Two
different readings are available to us. From one perspective, the larger
building is virtually giving birth to the smaller, coaxing us toward the
suggestion that you cannot nurse creativity without capital, that money
is the mother of any serious artistic effort. But when the exterior
casing of the Shed is pulled back and the structures look like rail
cars, another narrative is easily entertained — a train pushing its way
into a terminal, an invasion.
Unlike so much of Hudson Yards, the Shed indeed extends itself to those
beyond the payrolls of private equity professions. Tickets to events are
well-priced, some as low as $10. A restaurant from Danny Meyer called
Cedric’s is soon to appear in the lobby with nothing on the menu costing
more than $18, including tip. The lobby, for that matter, has an
earnestness and utility that other analogous spaces in the city tend to
forfeit for grandeur. When you walk through the doors of the
Metropolitan Opera, you imagine seeing people familiar to you from
stippled drawings of The Wall Street Journal; at the Shed you foresee
standing in line behind Scandinavian academics.
In its conception and programming, the Shed is ultimately an act of
repentance for the sins that surround it — an attempt at making amends
for all the greed and ostentation embodied in the $23 billion playpen in
which it has been sunk. To this end, an aesthetics of resistance has
been cultivated.
One night next month, for example, the McCourt, a major theatrical space
in the multilevel facility, will feature a presentation titled “Art and
Civil Disobedience with Boots Riley.’’ Boots Riley is the activist
rapper and filmmaker who was very involved in the Occupy movement in
Oakland, California, someone who joined the Progressive Labor Party at
the age of 15. His recent comedy, “Sorry to Bother You,” follows a young
black telemarketer struggling to pay the rent who is courted by the
temptations of selling out.
Not long after that event comes “Powerplay,’’ described in press
material for the Shed as “a woman-centered celebration of radical art
and healing created by multimedia artist Latasha.” Both presentations
are offered in conjunction with DIS OBEY, the Shed’s program for New
York City high school students from underserved communities, which
focuses on social protest through the use of poetry. An exhibit by the
conceptual artist Tony Cokes will explore gentrification.
What are we to make of these contradictions, of warrior spirits enabled
by the enemy force? One theater at the Shed is named for its benefactor
Ken Griffin, the hedge-fund manager who recently bought a penthouse on
Central Park South for $238 million, the greatest sum of money ever paid
for a home in this country. The construction of a billionaires’
principality in one of the most economically segregated cities on earth
is of course the problem worth the angry iambic pentameter. The Shed, in
the end, feels like the very generous birthday present you receive from
the rich man who stole your wife.
On the way in or out of the Shed, you will be able to stop at an outpost
of the McNally Jackson book store in the lobby, where you will not find
the kind of books read by the kind of people occupying the offices in
Hudson Yards. This is not the world of “Grit: The Power of Passion and
Perseverance”; it is the world of small-press social critique and
renegade voices.
When I visited on Wednesday, the books were cordoned off. But I
immediately noticed a copy of “Vile Days,” a collection of columns by
Gary Indiana written for The Village Voice in the 1980s chronicling the
end of the avant-garde art scene in New York, the triumphs of vulgarity,
consumerism and bad taste. Here, was the elegy as oracle.
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