It's been a thing most of my life, and other scale and influence, it's not any different to whatever artsy Foundation-with-buildings your city has, and they tend to be a thing apart, deeply rooted in the city and regional arts community, especially the performing arts: esthetic pleasures, a bit class-conscious in spots (and a bit overtly not in others), but for most events, a spot check of car radios in the parking lot is going to find more set for the NPR station than country, rock or right-wing talk. The venue often hosts things of less upscale appeal, touring Broadway shows, popular musical acts, speakers* and so on, too, but it's got its lane.
They're generally named after a local patron of the arts -- the Honeywell Center in Wabash, Indiana is a good example, a fine venue in moderate-sized county seat. The name tends to stick, too.
So when President Trump decided to add his name to the Kennedy Center, that was a bit incongruous. Not atypical of him; he loves to put his name on stuff. But it felt...off. And then they stuck the letters on the marble wall:
THE JOHN F. KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS
And that was just messed up. Not only was the wording flat-out awkward, a low-bidder rush job on a fancy marble-clad building, the fonts didn't match. Not even close, other than both being serif fonts on roughly Classical models. It looked like crap. It looked, in fact, like something big-city people might expect to see on a building serving a similar purpose in an Indiana County seat, except that I'm here to tell you, nobody in Wabash (etc.) would've stood for such a hack job on their nice performing arts center. If you're gonna change the name, they'd thunder, do it right! Match the old lettering or, if you can't, take it all off and start over. And try to follow the rules of grammar, too.
That didn't happen at the Kennedy Center. What did happen was, the new name went up like a bird splat on a wedding cake,, a lot of exhibits and displays were put into "storage," present whereabouts unknown to the public. The membership of the Board that runs it changed, which is a thing that Presidents can do, and a lot of the staff quit, retired or were laid off. As time went on and acts kept canceling, there were plans to shut the Center down for a couple of years of renovation, and rumors of deep and serious problems with the building itself. Are they true? Who can tell.
Now the courts have pulled the plug on the new name and the closure. The President has pulled the plug on his involvement, saying he's "returning responsibility to Congress" for running the place, a responsibility Congress has never had. And there are apparently "poison pills" in the Board's present funding arrangements, clauses that take money away if President Trump's name is removed from the Center. That'll go back the court system, you can count on it.
And this entire mess is over...ballet. Opera. Orchestral concerts. Touring shows. Or, at least, over who gets his name associated with those things, matters that, lovely and fine and uplifting though they are, have nothing to do with the average American sweating the price of gasoline and electricity or jingling coins nervously as the grocery store cash register beeps and the total increasing alarmingly. Real wages are level or declining; real prices are up. Changing the name on the Kennedy Center -- again -- is only going to affect income for the people doing that particular job, and maybe not even them; they probably already had plenty of other things to do at the same hourly rate.
It's just childish BS. In the middle of a not-a-war in the Middle East, a one-side-won't -call-it-a-war in Ukraine and a generous scattering of armed unrest, economic uncertainty and serious disease outbreaks all around the world. Does the country really have the time, money and energy to spare to keep on diddling with trivial Presidential whims?
___________________
* The county seat where I grew up didn't have much of a venue until the renovation of a semi-decrepit early 20th-Century Colosseum (honest, that's what it was called) in the late 20th and (again!) early 21st Centuries, but we had an arts & culture crowd who did things like make sure the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra gave local concerts and Buckminster Fuller came to give a talk, and rented whatever place they could find for it -- often, the big theater at the local High School. I was happy to listen; for just a little while, you were dreaming with Prokofiev or thinking Big Thoughts right along Fuller, at least until the final notes rang out or he said goodnight and you were still stuck in the corn-fed tail end of nowhere. Corn- and soybean-fed, maybe.
No comments:
Post a Comment