Art as an institution in American culture and economics seems to be in an uncomfortable position. If it’s pop music then, economically, the artists often do well, but there’s always questions, spoken or not, concerning its seriousness, while its revenue numbers often mark it as successful – if that’s an appropriate metric.
Then there’s more traditional, expensive, and difficult to measure arts and organizations for classical music, ballet, opera, and their kin – venerable, yet with an economic history of patronization and support by members of the elite classes. Whether an organization or art form from this class is “successful” becomes even more problematic.
And whether such is an essential part of, say, American culture becomes a difficult question, because whether we should or should not publicly fund such organizations in a supposed meritocracy / capitalist society when its contribution is not easily convertible to a currency … I’m almost speechless at the complexities.
Now, add in the neediness of a billionaire whose essential crassness makes him ineligible for entrance into high class society!
Ric Grenell, a diplomat and favorite of President Trump, was made Executive Director for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts back in January of 2025. A very prestigious organization, the Kennedy Center suffered an unprecedented cancellation rate of performing artists as its association with Mr Grenell and, more importantly, President Trump has reduced its prestige and importance on the American Arts scene; indeed, it has become so close to deserted that President Trump, undoubtedly in order to conceal his humiliation of being rejected, yet again, by the elite classes he’s so desperate to join, ordered it closed for renovation.
So is this important?
Certainly, the recent and sudden firing of Grenell[1] marks another chunk of the edifice called the Administration falling off and into the encroaching Sea, a body of chaos engendered by the arrogant amateurism generated and embraced by the very Administration from which it was born and now driving it into madness and abject failure. If I may wax, errrr, poetic.
But Trump’s rejection by the nebulous upper classes marks another failure on his part. Artists, for all their perilous existence in garrets, are both the originators and the mediums through which morality, both its rules and the questions that surround and change, or confirm, that morality, are conveyed to the citizenry; often, artists are the recipients of largesse from the upper classes for their work as their work justifies such recompense.
The rejection of the Trump-Kennedy Center by the artist class marks the refusal of artists to be associated with Trump, whose worship of wealth is considered the mark of an inferior morality, even though he may have been so infused in a prosperity church. Grenell claimed big productions were coming, but in the end the Center is closed, instead, and Grenell … reassigned to a position that sounds as fantastical as Noem’s. Will Grenell stick around and continue to be humiliated by President Trump?
1 Officially, Mr Grenell now holds the position of Special Presidential Envoy for Special Missions, which has undoubtedly led to a great deal of humor at his expense.
