Michael Andor Brodeur, The Washington Post’s music critic, weighs in on the takeover of the Kennedy Center by President Trump and his allies, and the resulting prospect of “a clear divergence from the mission laid out in the Kennedy Center’s authorizing statute requiring programs and policies that ‘meet the highest level of excellence and reflect the cultural diversity of the United States.’ ”
Changes to the center’s programming – banishment of what the president calls “woke” offerings and addition of more popular or populist attractions – “will reshape the story of American performing arts that the Kennedy Center has spent decades telling,” Brodeur writes. “After all, the Kennedy Center is more than a venue, it’s a ‘living monument’ – a place where the story of American culture plays out onstage. Whatever happens at the Kennedy Center becomes part of the history it exists to preserve.”
The key word there is “part.” And the fact is, not that big a part.
While the Kennedy Center was envisioned to be a national capitol of the performing arts, it never has been and almost certainly never will be. Washington is one of about two dozen US cities that qualify as major arts centers; by no objective measure does DC rate top billing among them.
New York is the capital city of music theater, spoken drama and dance; Washington is a tour stop. Its National Symphony Orchestra does not have the stature of the orchestras of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Washington National Opera is a second-tier company in artistic quality, third- or fourth-tier in programming in recent years.
The Kennedy Center’s performance spaces lack the seating capacity, layout and acoustics for most amplified music, which is to say most popular music. So a major, and vastly influential, part of American culture hasn’t and won’t figure too prominently in the center’s offerings.
Washington excels in three branches of the performing arts: It’s a top choral town, boasting, arguably, the country’s most theatrically adroit opera chorus. The city is home to three or four world-class chamber-music series. (The Kennedy Center presents both of those genres.) Wolf Trap, the performing-arts park in DC’s Virginia suburbs, is one of the nation’s finest open-air venues – although its highbrow programming is thin compared with, say, Tanglewood’s in Massachusetts or Ravinia’s in Chicago.
Some capital cities are also their countries’ artistic epicenters: London, Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, Prague, Helsinki, Buenos Aires, Tokyo. Others share the spotlight: Berlin with Munich and Bayreuth; Rome with Milan; Jerusalem with Tel Aviv; Moscow with St. Petersburg; Beijing with Shanghai and Hong Kong. And some capitals are artistically in the outback: Canberra, Bern, Brasília, Ankara.
On that spectrum, Washington is comparable to Rome or Moscow – a capital that dominates the nation’s civic culture, but not its artistic culture.
This country is too big and diverse to have a single artistic center. The arts scenes of places other than DC have longer histories, sturdier infrastructures, more distinguished venues and larger audiences, and nearly all of this country’s leading artists call those other places home.
What the Kennedy Center presents or excludes will have minimal effect on programming decisions elsewhere. Even in states that voted for the president: The urban and college-town artistic centers of red states tend to be blue in cultural outlook. Even in DC: Performances not welcome at the Kennedy Center are already moving to spaces that aren’t subject to government control or partisan influence.
The Kennedy Center takeover is jarring for Washington’s performing-arts scene and its audience. That audience includes influential political, media and interest-group figures. That accounts for the high profile of this story.
For the rest of us, arts mavens included, this is just one of many jarring changes in DC, and far from the most consequential one.
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