Donald Trump broke over 50 years of tradition on Feb. 12, when he removed every Biden-appointed person on the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (JFKC) and replaced them all with his own allies. This is the first time since its inception that the institution has been treated as a place for partisan politics. The new board quickly elected the president chairman, and they have already begun constructing a decidedly more restricted agenda, canceling performances with perceived liberal themes. This included the removal of Finn, a musical for children about a soft-hearted shark whose creators have indicated a message of support for queer children, and even an event that included the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, the Center’s new president, Richard Grenell, announced at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Feb. 21 that the JFKC would now feature a sizable “traditional production” (as per the New York Times) in honor of Jesus’ birth at Christmas.
Trump’s annexation of this organization is a catastrophe on multiple fronts. For one, at a time when some scholars find that Trump is clearing the way for the U.S. to become a genuine authoritarian country, it doesn’t look good that he feels entitled to dictate which art is effectively supported by the U.S. government. (Though the Kennedy Center’s programming, per their website, is funded via private donations and the selling of tickets, the government owns the building itself, and pays for its upkeep.) For another, given that Trump has claimed that the institution’s hosting of drag queens was one thing that drove him to take it over, this makes for yet another blow in his administration’s assault on gender nonconformity. For a third, Time magazine points out that the Kennedy Center functions crucially as a way to foster the trade of culture between the U.S. and other countries. After rising to office by demonizing immigrants and showing disdain for foreign allies, the performances Trump chooses to host could become one more way he tells the rest of the world that the United States doesn’t care about them.
Then there’s the harm that this does to the art world. The Kennedy Center is already selling half as many tickets as it was before Trump usurped the place. That means that works Trump doesn’t want to support will have one fewer place to go to make money—and that might be one place more than they can afford to lose.
“Most art is created to be consumed and to go forward through the use of money,” Niles North Director of Fine and Applied Arts Andrew Sinclair said. “Horribly made movies can still make $400 million and be called a success, whereas one of the greatest movies of [2023], Sing Sing, made less than $3 million dollars at the box office. What we deem to be successful is often dictated by money.” Venues themselves might feel forced not to host certain performances, out of fear that doing so will lose them money—or invite violence.
Even so, Sinclair expressed overall optimism in the face of such a cataclysm. For one, he pointed out, “Artists don’t like to be told not to perform or to create. So when one door closes, artists are really good at painting or dancing or performing a new door into existence.” He pointed to the story of the musical The Cradle Will Rock, which, after being prevented from being performed at a government-owned theater, was merely moved to a different theater elsewhere, where its cast played their parts sans costumes and from the audience.
Even with the Kennedy Center in Trump’s hands, there may—may—still be a way for those invited there to criticize the president. W. Kamau Bell chose to continue with a previously scheduled show after the president took power because he said he still felt able to be his “Black-a** self,” and he wanted to keep a door propped open for future comedians to be able to do similarly. Likewise, Jason Robert Brown, the composer behind Parade, a musical about the unjust 1915 lynching of a Jewish man accused of murdering a 13-year-old-girl, vowed that the show’s team was “not changing one word” when it goes onstage at the JFKC in August.
More than anything, it will become critical over the next four years for concerned Americans to give money to artists willing to rebel—which might happen naturally.
Suppressing a kind of art makes practicing that art a way of rebelling, and according to Sinclair, Americans will still like what they like, even if someone says they shouldn’t. “We can talk about drag queens reading to children and how some people think that’s bad, but there’s a reason why we’re on season 17 of RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
