Brooklyn, though having lost a famous baseball team (and, before that, an infamous football team), need weep no longer: it now has the up-to-date Brooklyn Academy of Music, the national leader in the presentation of guaranteed media-succulent avant-garde theater-cum-dance-cum-“music” extravaganzas. Indeed, so successful has the institution been under the guidance of Harvey Lichtenstein, its President and Chief Executive Officer, that Blam!—the title chosen for an exhibition of Pop, Minimalist, and performance art at the Whitney Museum this fall—might have been thought to refer not to the famous 1960s (Roy) Lichtenstein cartoon painting but to the 1980s (Harvey) Lichtenstein Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Jokes aside, the Brooklyn Academy’s record in presenting what it has chosen to call the “Next Wave” has been notable. A successful series sailing under this name took place in 1983; it featured eleven attractions, among them such icons of the new as dancers Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Carolyn Carlson, and Molissa Fenley, and theatrical animateurs Lee Breuer (of Mabou Mines fame) and George Coates. This year—with one exception—the presentation roster seemed a bit slimmer in hype value; on the whole the names of the artists—dancers Remy Charlip, Bill T. Jones, Arnie Zane, Mark Morris, and Elisa Monte, videogra-pher Tim Morris, far-out saxophonist Richard Landry, and even composer Steve Reich—appeared to come out of the debate within the experimental art world rather than to stand perched, as their predecessors of the year before had been, on what might be called the brink of true media