The Brooklyn Rail (BR) is a multimedia, Brooklyn based, arts social media outlet. They publish a newsletter and provide a Monday thru Friday zoom to YouTube artist or arts organization interview that presumably anyone can participate in. Usually this involves one hundred or fewer live participants and a few dozen additional YouTube views.
The Zoom meetings include the ability to hold a side chat between one another audience members. The principals in the Zoom conversation can choose to see or ignore these comments and these comments never show up in the YouTube exports of the Zoom call.
And these chat room conversations are moderated - presumably to eliminate any inappropriate remarks or malicious content in the chat room. One would hope that the moderation isn't intended to exercise bigotry against legitimate material being shared.
Unfortunately, the Brooklyn Rail podcasts are moderated in a way that calling it The Brooklyn Bus of Bigotry would be a more appropriate label for the enterprise.
The BR's subtitle claims "Critical Perspectives on Arts, Politics and Culture" but doesn't really practice it. With few exceptions the editorial hegemony that governs all of its content is closer to an exercise in liberal fascism than Critical Perspective. The explicit allegation about their representation is that they represent and defend the intellectual voices of the marginalized, under-represented, and, well, the litany of victimization adjectives is far too long to list. Suffice it to say that no identity politic group is too small or ridiculous to be included in this community.
A practicing artist, minding their own business, and attempting to make apolitical art is not welcome in that cohort. 'Community' by their practical definition doesn't include anyone who isn't a victim (e.g. you or I). And therein lies not only the root of the bigotry but the weaponization of amplifying race, gender, skin color, sexual preference, and so on as a profit platform.
The editorial architecture of the BR guarantees a strict and unapologetic conformity of thought and opinion. The BR employs a number of editors whose specialty is the bigotry of low expectations. Their gender editors are gay, queer, or non-binary and their guests always identify by gender. Rare if ever is there a discussion about art that isn't a fawning, mutual gender admiration discussion. Art is always the collateral neglected topic.
Likewise with the Trump Derangement Syndrome editors. In these interviews the artist being featured must spend at least fifteen minutes showing their politically correct inoculation credentials. They hate Trump, love BLM, are not sexually straight, their personal identity is a mystery to everyone, they've been marginalized by the mythic patriarchy, they decolonize their lives with anti-Western bleach, and on and on and on. No evidence is ever required and no logical coherency is ever offered.
dare to ask what any of it has to do with their art in the chat and you will be eliminated from addressing the chat group with all comments going to the null bin direct messages of the moderator of the day.
"The New Social Environment is a space for community and intellectual exchange. Please be generous with each other, and allow us all space to interpret and discuss."
Some BR editors constrain conversations to art and they are often richer and more generally worthwhile participatory fare.
As a platform, one of many problems is the fact that all of their Zoom moderators are young and female. Aside from Phong Bui, the publisher, there is not a male speaker to be found among the general staff.
The women find every Zoom participant "awesome", "generous", and "amazing". And the experience of the Zoom calls is often that of an echo chamber with designated chat cheerleaders who elevate even the most mundane artistic exchanges as epiphanies. To offer any contradictory input is troublesome.
And therein lies the biggest problem the BR promotes. that is that the so-called "New Social Environment" is not only no better than the old one but an insultingly condescending alternative.
If artists "of color" are looking for equality, one would think that treating them with equal respect would mean having adult conversations about their art and process. Likewise, young women who claim an entitlement to privileged representation in galleries, museums, and shows need to provide some/any evidence that their art deserves such favor. They don't. In the New Social Environment they can freely vent their spleen full of alleged evils by men without a hint of proof.
Other groups all enjoy this non-critical pretense of victimization and birthright innocence while condemning the other - whoever they think they are.
All of this is to say that this echo chamber mentality ensures new generations of racism, victim-hood, and needy narcissism that does nothing more than pollute a generous society that does its imperfect best to create a better world. And a better world lifts every aesthetic ship.