seem actually to be trying to walk the walk.Ī funny thing about Poots is that, as he speaks, he seems almost to be both boasting about the Shed and apologizing for it at once, as if keenly aware at each moment of the potential objections and criticism: The Shed is for the celebrity-obsessed the Shed is just a big trophy in search of a purpose the Shed can’t help but be a symbol, just by dint of the forces that brought it into being, of the antiseptic new New York.Īlex Poots (right) speaks next to Chen Shi-Zenhg after the Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise rehearsal at the Tisch Skylights inside the new arts center the Shed. It’s hard to judge from the outside, but Poots and Co. It’s one thing when the billionaires adopt this language in such a self-congratulatory way, and quite another for the actual staff of the place. The Programīelieve it or not, though, you can be too cynical about all this. And it seems eager to compete for distinction not by paying allegiance to the Western Canon but by embracing the rhetoric of woke cosmopolitanism. The Shed Elite, seemingly, wants to be associated with values of innovation and experimentation instead of taste and connoisseurship the future instead of the past. ![]() There’s an interesting point here about what the Shed represents in terms of the contemporary evolution of what used to be called “bourgeois culture.” It once was that the elite defined itself as keepers of tradition, and went to the opera or theater as spaces that defined a culture of educated distinction. He sounded as if he wanted to be launching a movement, not a mixed-use arts venue: “In a world replete with cynicism, the Shed is an example of quite the opposite.” (To which my inner cynic responds, “so… it’s an example of naïveté?”)Įntrance to the McCourt. He declared the Shed to be the new frontier of exploring the “civic imagination,” a place for “ideas put into action to serve people, to better humanity,” to explore “human creativity for the greater good,” to inspire “social innovation.” Co-architect David Rockwell even at one point declared that an institution with a “large and diverse audience has no better food partner than Danny Meyer.”įrank McCourt, speaking from the McCourt stage and so, like Aquaman in the sea, a man feeling his own power, took things to a fever pitch. The words “diverse,” “inclusive,” and “social impact” were repeated again and again. What was more striking, however, is how all the presenters seemed to have absorbed the rhetoric of social justice into their pitch for the Shed. Photo courtesy Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images. Jon Tisch, chairman emeritus of the United States Travel Association, speaks at the new arts center the Shed at the Hudson Yards during a media preview on April 03, 2019, in New York City. The Shed, he promises, is a new-model cultural institution, one for the era when the borders between fine art and pop culture, wavering since the ‘60s at least, have well and truly broken down-when the average audience member is assumed to be uninterested in little things like medium or tradition, and just wants access to whatever is New, Different, and Popular. Poots was clever enough to turn that weakness into a strength: He made the lack of mission into a mission in and of itself. From the outside, it always looked like the idea for the Shed was conjured out of the blind imperative to have something special to anchor the West Side’s new luxury mega-development, Hudson Yards, and little else but a cloud of words like “New!” “Different!” and “Popular!” ![]() ![]() Poots is also, by all accounts, the person who managed to give the nascent institution some real mission. Poots is the person who managed to get the institution to change its name from its mortifying original moniker-“The Culture Shed”-to the shorter, hipper “The Shed,” which sounds like a rustic-themed Bushwick bar with $16 cocktails and the arcade game Big Buck Hunter. The Shed, the brand-new, half-billion-dollar cultural institution opening on the West Side of Manhattan, is very, very lucky to have Alex Poots as its director.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |