From a month ago:
“My criteria, President Trump’s criteria, is different,” [Kennedy Center President Richard] Grenell said. “We cannot have arts institutions that lose money because you have programming that is woke or not popular. We need popular programming to sustain arts institutions.” [WaPo]
Nonsense. Opera, theater, ballet, all of these art forms and more, when a new specimen happens on the scene, must work to find the proper form to effectively express them. This is not a five minute exercise, but it may be a five production exercise, or even more, because this is difficult and laborious work; to claim otherwise is to demonstrate profound ignorance.
To impose a limitation from another sector of society is to pervert the expression of the art, and that’s just … dumb. Corporate sponsorships are an implicit recognition that we have a society that principally functions in the private sector, that art does not fit that sector’s practices very well, and the sponsorships are attempts to bandage over the unfortunate problem.
