Art or advertising? Well, NY Liberty CEO says the arena's "You/We Belong Here" signage is part of Clara Wu Tsai's "mystique," helping forge a business success.

So Adweek Feb. 24 published The New York Liberty's journey from chaos to a championship, an interview with team CEO Keia Clarke.

Asked, "How active has ownership been in creating the Liberty's culture?", Clarke responded:

Clara [Wu Tsai] is an amazing mind who sees the Liberty as having so much potential that she wanted to support it with her own resources, and I don't just mean financial resources. Clara does interviews, Clara invites celebrities to games, and Clara is the torchbearer for what this will be in the long term—and I can't ask for anything more than that.

And they're doing it in the spirit of Brooklyn. The "You Belong Here. We Belong Here" sign that's in front of Barclays Center. That's Clara Wu Tsai's sign, vision, and mystique, and that's what she brings to the table every single day. So how could you not want to run through a wall and make sure that the business success and the KPIs are growing?

(Emphasis added)

That's, um,"tricky," to use Henry Abbott's word for previous Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov.

After all, it was presented as an art and social upliftment project by the Social Justice Fund set up by Joe and Clara Wu Tsai. 

 

This seeming civic gesture also doubles as advertising and reputation enhancement.

After all, the signage, to me, serves both as art and advertising, as I wrote for The Indypendent in December 2021, encouraging people to buy tickets for arena events. 

 

Most people I ask about it are baffled, but Clarke got the memo.

Official rhetoric

Upon the installation, the Social Justice Fund stated, it "will be on long-term view at the entrance of Barclays Center, atop the Atlantic Avenue–Barclays Center Station complex, and will serve as an affirmation of belonging as well as a call to unity in the heart of Brooklyn.

Then again, artist Tavares Strachan, commenting on an earlier version of the piece, acknowledged, “It’s a seemingly friendly gesture kind of couched in an array of really tough questions.”

Thus—to transpose an observation by writer Alice Gregory—the Tsais both compelled criticism and inoculated themselves against it. While the initial term was three years, it was renewed in 2024.

Two views

According to the authorizing document, it's about social justice:

Its unmistakable message of inclusion, diversity, equality, and unity will resonate in the Brooklyn community and beyond and serve as a visual reflection of the goal of the Brookiyn-focused $50M social justice and equality initiative announced by Clara Wu Tsai and Joe Tsai last year.

Or, alternatively, from an 11/30/23 article, No Place to Be, in the New York Review of Architecture, about the world of documentarian John Wilson, which author Jake Romm posits as against the commodification of our shared urban space. 

Romm sees it as a subversion of authenticity:

There is a sign next to the Barclays Center that sends pinpricks of revulsion down my spine every time I see it. You know the one: “We Belong Here,” in pink, neon cursive script. Opened in 2012, Barclays famously displaced hundreds of neighborhood residents, drove out small business owners by raising property prices, and created a permanent traffic jam on Atlantic Avenue. The arena’s arty welcome mat is, of course, a paean to the “authentic city” marketing tactic that effaces and tokenizes those who really did once belong. But read another way, the motto effects a defensive posture in the face of suspicion and recites the consumer’s prerogative: “We have our tickets, we bought our treats, we have a right to be here.”