Paradox of the Kennedy Center

Almost from the first day of the second Trump administration, one of the primary goals has been to dismantle or entirely remake the Kennedy Center, the very impressive if (I speculate) unbeloved block of marble across the street from the Watergate, on the shores of the Potomac about a mile from the White House. I grew up near there, and I remember when it was built. My mom thought it was hideous.

I remember going to a number of concerts there, in particular a show by the amazing country-rock band Seatrain. As a teen, it struck me that the venue seemed inappropriate for that sort of music, with its gigantically high ceilings, the biggest crystal chandeliers anyone had ever seen, and the ugliest and largest portrait bust in America: an eight-foot high, 3000 pound item by Robert Berks. It captures JFK's "young hero" spirit, according to Center historian Barbara Morris. Does it, though?

I’d describe the historical spirit of the Kennedy Center, offhand, as extreme mainstream. It constitutes an unchallenging representation of the arts establishment presented by the nation's least interesting billionaires. And it’s been ripped to shreds by Trump in a few weeks, as he's replaced the director and the board, and performers have canceled their scheduled shows. If next year's Kennedy Center Honors go to Kid Rock and Kanye West, no one will be shocked, though everyone will express shock.

The building, with its several performance venues, was intended when completed in 1971 to be a tribute to Kennedy, who’s often called the most arts-oriented American president since Jefferson. By all accounts, Kennedy set in motion the National Endowment for the Arts and relentlessly emphasized the allegedly central role of art in a democracy. He’s relentlessly quoted, as in his tribute to the poet Robert Frost, delivered just a couple of week's before Kennedy's assassination: "Our national strength matters, but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much… I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens. And I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well."

Kennedy was doing this at the very height of the Cold War, as the CIA (through its front group the "Council for Cultural Freedom") and other intelligence agencies sponsored touring art shows and performances and novels and poems and literary journals. The centrality of the arts to a democracy, for Kennedy, was accounted for by their use as weapons or their embodiment of Western cultural superiority. For a time the authorities were particularly taken with Abstract Expressionism. But every artist who got this sort of support was used for purposes not their own, and in some cases for purposes antithetical to their own values.

Kennedy had on board what we might call "the ideology of modernism," according to which the artist is a solitary genius who stands against society, an embodiment of human hope and self-determination: the very essence of freedom. "The artist," he said, "however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, a lover's quarrel with the world. In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he must often sail against the currents of his time."

The words, as I say, are often quoted, but in context they constitute a devastating paradox. Kennedy is using them here, as the CIA used them across Europe, to symbolize freedom of expression and individualism. But here those values (which I endorse, by the way) amount to little but scurrilous anti-communist ideology. The brilliance of Pollock or De Kooning (and of literary figures as well) is nationalized, as it were, or weaponized, with or without their knowledge. Their intense expressions of their own experience become national badges of honor. What works for that purpose, or for the government's purpose at any given moment, is nurtured, funded, preserved in marble. What doesn’t is extruded, marginalized, not in the budget.

Kennedy's words, and the fact that he was the person saying them, expressed just the opposite of what they said: he wanted the arts sponsored by, not exempted from, the ministrations of the "officious state," and directly pursued that goal, which is fully crystallized in the Kennedy Center, an appropriate tribute indeed.

Government funding isn’t, as is sometimes claimed, a plausible index of how much the country cares about its culture. It's a set of manipulations designed to produce ideological or propaganda outcomes. That should be obvious at the moment, as Trump is making it explicit. We’re going to see a lot of terrible art now which is explicitly "patriotic" and relentlessly nationalistic, as the Trump administration both vitiates existing arts institutions and funding procedures and pushes the creation of a new version of Soviet-era socialist and nationalist "realism."

I prefer golden-era CIA art like Rothko and the Paris Review to pictures of Stalin leading the ecstatic Russian masses in a victory parade. But, whether it's Stalin, Kennedy, or Trump, I want the government out of the art business. If Kennedy was sincere when he said what art is, the officious state he commanded should’ve left it to look after itself.

—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @crispinsartwell