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The news that Donald Trump is shutting down the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington DC this July – for some as yet unspecified renovations – is raising a new chorus of alarm bells over the crude and lawless imposition of his vision on the nation’s capital.
It’s somewhat befitting this president’s self-serving second term that one of the final events there was the premiere of a documentary about his wife, Melania. I haven’t seen it, but Maureen Dowd of the New York Times describes it as a “gilded informercial”.)
Out of some similar narcissistic impulse, Trump slapped his own name, unasked, on the structure recently. To many in the arts community, it was like a mangy lapdog peeing on a fence post. In response, prestige performers have been exiting the centre’s schedule in droves. The latest: Composer Phillip Glass and soprano Renee Fleming. Audiences have fled, too. That is what apparently has provoked the face-saving announcement of the renovation.
The idea that Trump couldn’t do that much damage to the physical setting of Washington was put to rest when he bulldozed the East Wing of the White House. Not since the Taliban surveyed the Giant Buddhas of Bamiyan for dynamiting have we seen such irrational anti-cultural zeal. Those who love the Kennedy Centre might genuinely need to worry that we could find that it, too, has been razed.
The building was designed and constructed under the Lyndon Johnson administration in honour of JFK after his assassination and has stood since as a fitting testament to that young president’s embrace of both national and world culture.
It sits on the far western end of downtown Washington – not the most picturesque of locations. There are no train stations nearby, and you have to traverse an elaborate motorway interchange to get to it. To the north is the looming Watergate complex, to the south the Lincoln Memorial.
The Kennedy Centre can’t be compared to the beauty of the Sydney Opera House, inside or out, but it has a definite austere modernist presence. The halls of the building are grand, and at the front is a marvellous giant bust of the fallen president, supposedly weighing some 1500 kilograms. In the same hall is the Millennium Stage, on which free performances — often of notable figures playing one of the major venues that night — are staged almost daily.
When I lived in DC, I oversaw among other things the arts coverage of National Public Radio. Being the arts editor of a major news organisation is one of the best jobs in the world, and I spent a lot of time at the Kennedy Centre. I saw the National Orchestra regularly, once or twice with a president on hand. I saw the Royal Shakespeare Company presenting As You Like It, and innumerable rock and jazz acts, including Sufjan Stevens on the Millennium Stage. I saw Jerry Seinfeld and The Producers, and a workshop version of a new Sondheim musical.
I once saw director Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney there, embedded in the crowd filing cinema verite scenes for their HBO series K Street.
Many presidents have made hay out of playing the part of an unsophisticate; Trump has gone the distance to make himself the embodiment of naked anti-intellectualism and cultural warfare. Shortly after taking office for his second term, he replaced the centre’s culturally diverse and non-partisan board with a band of his cronies.
The New York Times reported how one of Trump’s programming execs is said to have remarked, after seeing a Cuban dance company, “Wow, they’re so talented they could be on a cruise ship.”
There’s also the usual right-wing invented mania about supposed wokeness. Trump and the centre’s new chief executive Richard Grenell have disparaged Hamilton, saying they preferred “Les Miz”. (You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Les Miserables first played the Kennedy Centre back in the 1980s before it went to Broadway.)
As has become usual with Team Trump, the latest sudden announcement is ridiculous and unnecessary, and done with malevolent intent. Disorganised and senseless all at once.
Renovation of a major institution is of course something that is planned years in advance, not announced abruptly amid a rant on social media. Trump hasn’t explained why a building that underwent a $US250 million upgrade within the last decade suddenly needed another. If in the end he doesn’t end up physically destroying it, it seems he will achieve a lesser but still ignominious goal, just silencing another voice in a vibrant and diverse world.
Bill Wyman is a former assistant managing editor of National Public Radio in Washington. He teaches at the University of Sydney.
Bill Wyman is a former assistant managing editor of National Public Radio in Washington. He teaches at the University of Sydney.From our partners
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