Arts
In Ever-Gentrifying Brooklyn, Can an Arts Complex Appeal to All?
David Binder, the new artistic director at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, must bridge a multitude of divides—between music, dance, theater, and art, and between a local and global audience.
Binder outside BAM in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
Photographer: Alec Kugler for Bloomberg Businessweek
When David Binder was asked to apply for the position of artistic director at the Brooklyn Academy of Music—a sprawling, three-theater arts complex with annual revenue of $50 million—he didn’t think he had a shot. “Who wouldn’t want it?” he says. But unlike colleagues up for the job, Binder hadn’t spent decades working in an arts institution.
Instead he’d worked as a producer of Broadway hits including Hedwig and the Angry Inch, organized the High Line festival (with David Bowie as curator), and guest-directed the London International Festival of Theatre.