The Kennedy Center Is Being Torn Apart By Its Own Contradictions
According to Google, Eisenhower initiated what became the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts with the National Cultural Center Act in 1958 because, during his WWII travels, he heard how the world (likely Europe) saw the U.S. as focused on money and superficiality, while the Soviet Union could offer more advanced cultural offerings. So, this National Cultural Center would project U.S. cultural depth, but what really was going on at the time was the destruction of Black communities and music and gathering spaces all across the country, like Pittsburgh’s Hill District, like Detroit’s Black Bottom. Anyway, the National Cultural Center was an example of the home front of anti-communist cultural propaganda, while the CIA sponsored international cultural propaganda via the Congress of Cultural Freedom, spending millions promoting pro-American movies, journals, visual art exhibitions in Europe to try and stem communism’s growth in Europe.
In both cases, the capital and managerial classes used artists, and artists sometimes knowingly partnered with them, to tell a story of U.S. sophistication and freedom. All the while, Jim Crow was still active in the South and there would be a decade of Black rebellions because of the terrible living conditions in the North. The thing is that, again, according to Google, the idea of a national cultural center came out of the 1930s and intentions to support arts and cultural workers in the spirit of the Federal Works Progress program, itself rumored to be part of an effort to stave off a growing socialist movement by employing millions. However, what we eventually got was an institution to project a national image to facilitate settler colonialism and imperialism.
Eisenhower tried to put lipstick on the proverbial pig because the culture of the ruling class is actually violent and materialistic, and they don’t actually support the day-to-day cultural workers upholding various traditions with actual work. Now, a reality TV star is the actual president and doesn’t care about liberals’ altar of fine art, and PPS wants to close Miller African Centered Academy, whose founders had/have intentions of deepening the cultural practice of working-class Black people on a day-to-day basis, beyond performance or exhibition. The thing is, neither capital-class tendency, liberal or white nationalist, is helpful to the majority when what is really needed is something much more like the WPA (although that was racist too). I say that having worked/working to uphold the liberal side via philanthropy/nonprofits, I just don’t think we need to try and turn the Kennedy Center into some bastion of democracy.
If the Kennedy Center was going to support millions of cultural workers, one that would be in dialogue with Miller African Centered Academy, that would be one thing, but I doubt most artists/cultural workers would even be impacted by its closing. I performed once there with a company I was in in the Millennium space while people milled about. I didn’t find that setting particularly respectful, but later the company's higher-level artists did a main-stage performance that was a big hit. How many arts and culture workers are really impacted by it overall? Also, can folks chill with the Kennedy accolades? The Cuban people are being strangled right now, and Kennedy is right in the mix with the whole continued era of anti-communist violence and propaganda.
