The Kennedy Center doesn't have an ice rink.... YET.
I'm foreseeing a Lee Greenwood Kennedy Center Residency.
“… Trump’s takeover of a cultural institution should not just be a source of amusement, especially since the president has also promised to change the center’s programming. The moves put him in the company—historic and current—of tyrants, not auteurs.
Classical music is rarely front-page news, and the move took the Kennedy Center by complete surprise. The cultural center in Foggy Bottom, after all, hosts a leading symphony orchestra and a major opera company and is hardly a center of political fights.
… The jokes swiftly faded when, a few days later, Trump
appointed Grenell the Kennedy Center’s interim executive director. The jokes fell completely silent when, on Feb. 12, the Kennedy Center
announced its new trustees, installed to replace trustees fired by Trump. Those now installed on the board of trustees
include Vice President J.D. Vance’s wife, Usha; Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles; his deputy chief of staff, Dan Scavino; White House Presidential Personnel Director Sergio Gor; and Allison Lutnick, the wife of Trump’s secretary of commerce nominee, Howard Lutnick.
… I’d hate to be alarmist, but the president of the United States is invoking the language of a certain German regime that, in the 1930s, banned what it labeled “
Entartete Kunst,” degenerate art.
The Nazis wanted German culture organized neatly under the government’s control. Soon after taking power, this regime made its preferences known to Germany’s myriad publicly funded theaters, opera houses, and concert halls. It also created the
Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture), under which culture in Germany would operate; Joseph Goebbels
was appointed the chamber’s president.
Soon German culture—for so long the envy of the world—became more and more constrained as practitioners and artistic products, especially books, were banned, while other practitioners, from conductors to painters, engaged in self-censorship or left the country. That’s how Thomas Mann ended up in Pacific Palisades. In his novel
Mephisto, Klaus Mann—Thomas’s son—masterfully portrays the careerists who thrive in autocracies, while talent withers.
And the urge to control culture didn’t die with Goebbels and his ilk. Wanting to control culture is, in fact, the hallmark of authoritarian regimes.
The Cold War was characterized by Eastern Bloc regimes’ attempts to govern all culture and, in the process, ensure that undesirable expressions of it were weeded out.
Every novel Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote was at immediate risk of being banned, and the Russian author constantly faced the risk of imprisonment. In Czechoslovakia,
Vaclav Havel was kept under constant surveillance and denied jobs worthy of his talent. The artists the regimes deemed acceptable, by contrast, were well-looked-after by the respective countries’ cultural organizations. Untold numbers of artists less known than Solzhenitsyn and Havel suffered the same fate. …”
