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The Washington elites are in quite a tizzy after President Donald Trump made himself the chairman of the board at the Kennedy Center and promised that “we’re gonna make it hot.”
In addition, Trump fired the president of the long left-leaning Kennedy Center, Deborah Rutter, replacing her with ally Richard Grenell, who will be in charge of restoring this once great institution into an arts palace for the people once again.
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All the right people are unhappy about this change. An incredibly tone-deaf New York Times subheadline blared, “What will a thin-skinned showman do with an institution central to Washington’s cultural life? One expectation is more country music.”
Oh, no!! Not country music! You can feel the sad condescension in every word of this.
Yes, the Visogoths are at the gates of the Kennedy Center. In fact, they kind of own the building, and thank God, because the recent leadership has rendered the institution all but irrelevant to the lives of ordinary folks.
This failure is rooted in the fact that, instead of focusing on bringing popular entertainment to the center, in addition to its staples of symphony and opera, this broken arts organization prioritizes wokeness with drag shows and all other manner of DEI programming.
John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts shot at dusk across the Potomac in Georgetown
The Kennedy Center, which, by the way, also ran a million-dollar budget deficit last year, doesn’t focus on getting butts in seats. Like so many failing arts endeavors, it focuses on promoting a social agenda, even if they are just repeating it over and over to the same liberal elitist Washington audience.
For far too long, America’s arts organizations have done more to lecture than to uplift, more to coerce than to enlighten.
If we want, as we should, the Kennedy Center to be a vital and active attraction again, a part of people’s lives, there are worse impresarios to turn to than Donald Trump. Say what you will about Trump, but the man knows how to draw a crowd, and frankly, more than anything else, that is what the Kennedy Center needs. If he can do for the Kennedy Center what he did for the presidency, it will be the hottest ticket in the capital.
The purpose of a country music concert or a comedy show, or any other event that the sneering snobs look down on, is to attract and entertain an audience. The Kennedy Center is supposed to be a forum where Americans, who own it, can be entertained.
Trump is not going to disband the National Symphony Orchestra, which predates the Kennedy Center, anyway. He’s not going to force them to only play “YMCA” and “Tiny Dancer.”
But what absolutely can happen is that among the 5,000 who might see a Lee Greenwood concert at the center, some will see the posters for the more classical offerings and say to themselves, “Hey, that might be cool to check out.”
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Further, the Kennedy Center can be a place where local artists, even if they aren’t non-profits, even if they don’t push a DEI agenda, can use the spaces and theaters to promote even more local engagement.
For far too long, America’s arts organizations have done more to lecture than to uplift, more to coerce than to enlighten. If we are being honest, they’ve done more to demoralize than to entertain. That must change.
Nobody can look at the current staid and stolid state of the Kennedy Center and believe it is fulfilling its mission as a core cultural hub for the people. If the people are going to pay for it with their tax dollars, they deserve it to be exactly that.
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It makes all the sense in the world for Trump and Grenell to take the helm of the Kennedy Center and try to drive it back into relevance. It truly can be not only an artistic jewel, but a place where people from all walks of life gather and contemplate the broad expanse of our unique culture. Public art and performance space is almost as old as cities themselves, and in cultures that are thriving, those artistic works complement the politics and science of the times. But that only happens if the people actually show up.
So go for it Mr. President, make the Kennedy Center great again. And save me an aisle seat.
