The uncertain future of the performing arts
Plus, a brewing feud between two classical music radio stations.
Hello. In the last week, I:
Saw Sarah Chihaya and Merve Emre in conversation at NYPL for Chihaya’s memoir, Bibliophobia.
Saw Ann Goldstein and Joumana Khatib in conversation at McNally Jackson for Goldstein’s new translation of Alba De Céspedes’s 1938 novel There’s No Turning Back.
Saw New York City Ballet’s All Balanchine II program (which will run a final time for the season on Tuesday) for principal dancer Ashley Bouder’s last performance in her 25-year career with the company. I wrote about it a little on Instagram.
Shared my January book recap here.
Onto the news.
The biggest story in the arts world continues to be Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center, which we discussed at length last week. Since then, he dismissed all Biden appointees and filled the rest of the board with his own appointees, who then nominated him as board chair. Trump fired Kennedy Center president Deborah Rutter, who had planned to leave the organization later this year, and late last week, she gave her first interview on NPR’s All Things Considered. He replaced her with his longtime ally, Richard Grenell, as interim president, who also said late last week he will run for governor of California if former vice president Kamala Harris enters the race. Okay.
The New York Times was on location at the Kennedy Center Thursday, the day after Trump’s appointment as board chair, to report on the general mood among employees and performance attendees. It appears there is an air of uncertainty—and no shortage of derision:
“I feel like we might just have ‘Cats’ on rotation moving forward,” said Pamela Deutsch, a documentary film producer who once worked as an usher at the Kennedy Center. (Mr. Trump, who once had dreams of becoming a Broadway producer, is a longtime fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber.)
Comedian W. Kamau Bell, who performed a set at the Center on Thursday, relayed no shortage of jokes about Trump, and drag performers and LGBTQ+ activists and allies protested Trump’s appointment outside of the Center. American Ballet Theatre began its first performances of Crime and Punishment, while at least one attendee wondered to the Times if Trump’s coziness with Putin would result in invitations to the Mariinsky and Bolshoi ballets. (Meanwhile, the National Ballet of China performed at the Kennedy Center recently for Chinese New Year, which led two Republican congressmen on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party to raise concerns about the company’s potential to disseminate propaganda via performance).
Several artists have since canceled Kennedy Center appearances or distanced themselves from the institution; Issa Rae canceled a sold-out show in March, Ben Folds recused himself as an artistic advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra, operatic soprano Renée Fleming resigned as an advisor to the Kennedy Center, and Shonda Rhimes stepped down from her post as Kennedy Center board treasurer. The National Symphony Orchestra’s musicians put out a non-statement statement on Facebook, that said they were “proud to perform for [their] patrons, [their] community in our nation’s national capital and the country at large.”
The future of the Kennedy Center remains fraught, and this is a story we’ll continue to follow. It’s clear that the administration’s seizure of the national performing arts center is anything but harmless, and partisan control could drastically transform it. For now, the Center does still have its social impact mission intact on its website.
After performing in ABT’s Crime and Punishment, principal dancer Calvin Royal III published a statement on Instagram, writing:
To perform on this stage—at a time when the lives of our friends, neighbors and loved ones are being targeted, attacked, and pulled in every direction by unimaginable forces—has been a reminder of the incredible power of what we can achieve when we stand together. […]
The arts and artists will ALWAYS be the keepers of the flame and a bridge. Regardless of who you are or how you stand politically, it’s through love and devotion of what we create (together) that we can find common ground. Anything or anyone getting in the way of that is a huge problem. Art doesn’t just entertain—it connects us, it heals, and it reminds us of who we are and who we can aspire to be.
As the wealthiest people veer even more sharply to the right, does that mean that conservative art will sell the best? This is a question that Scott Reyburn ponders in The Art Newspaper. Contemporary art sales have been sliding for several years now, and while Trump tariffs are likely to hurt gallerists and curators who must contend with higher shipping and material costs, Trump policies that are likely to give the uber-wealthy a tax benefit could lead the mega-rich to purchase some paintings. So what will they want to buy?
For now, it seems like the answer is “paintings that seems politically neutral and in some way calmingly decorative”—such as British painter Cecily Brown’s abstract canvases, American artist Christina Quarles’s “abstract figuration,” Belgian artist Ben Sledsens’s gentle Surrealism, or LA-based artist Jonas Wood’s graphic landscapes. “People are so worried about wars and climate change that they want to soothe their minds with something beautiful, nothing negative, something nice to look at,” collector Luc Haenen told The Art Newspaper.
Meanwhile, artists are protesting auction house Christie’s to try to get it to cancel an upcoming auction of AI art that is slated to run February 20 through March 5. An open letter, which more than 6,200 artists have signed, reads:
“Many of the artworks you plan to auction were created using AI models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a license. These models, and the companies behind them, exploit human artists, using their work without permission or payment to build commercial AI products that compete with them.”
A representative from Christie’s told ArtNews that the artists represented in the upcoming auction have “strong, existing multidisciplinary” practices and use “artificial intelligence to enhance their bodies of work.” Nicole Sales Giles, Christie’s vice-president and director of digital art sales, told the publication, before the open letter was published, that “AI is not a replacement for human creativity,” and that in many of the works for sale, human agency is key.
The Getty Museum, meanwhile, just acquired its first artificial intelligence-generated photograph, ArtNews also reported. Cristian en el Amor de Calle (2024), by Costa Rican photographer Matías Sauter Morera, depicts two pegamachos, cowboys from the Guanacaste Coast, who secretly had gay love affairs. AI, Morera told ArtNews, helps protect the identities of the figures in the artwork: “Since the pegamachos culture remains hidden, these AI images serve as a mimicry of photography, a fiction, and a medium through which I can imagine and construct an imagined parallel history.” The work will appear in the exhibit The Queer Lens: A History of Photography, which opens June 17.
In Chicago, there’s reason for Francophiles to celebrate: Jeffrey and Carol Horvitz donated more than 2,000 French Old Masters to the Art Institute of Chicago, including 200 paintings and 50 sculptures; the bulk of the donation is drawings. The pieces span from the 16th to the 19th century and primarily represent the Neoclassical style, The Art Newspaper reported.
A quick check-in on the National Endowment for the Arts: We spoke last week about how the NEA eliminated its grant-making programs for underrepresented groups. Now, it’s released new guidance for grant applicants, which specifies that anyone who applies for an NEA grant needs to comply with Trump’s executive orders:
The applicant will not operate any programs promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws, in accordance with Executive Order No. 14173.
The applicant understands that federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology, pursuant to Executive Order No. 14168, Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.
Obviously, this has huge implications for many of the arts groups that rely on—or have dramatically benefitted from—NEA funding, such as the Chicago nonprofit Black Girls Dance, which told the New York Times it is uncertain if it still qualifies for the $10,000 grant it was recently approved.
We know that the NEA is prioritizing projects that celebrate the upcoming 250th birthday of the United States in 2026, and it’s unclear what those projects will actually look like under a Trump administration. That said, there have been nonpartisan efforts to recognize the Semiquincentennial. For instance, Carnegie Hall just announced its 2025-2026 season, which will include more than 35 concerts that capture the “American spirit through music,” as a part of its “United in Sound: America at 250” festival that will kick off next January. You can expect to see programming on American composers, the American musical, and similar offerings.
What I find most exciting about the season, though, is decidedly not American: the Estonian Festival Orchestra playing an all Arvo Pärt program in October and the opening night gala which I am quite literally desperate to attend because it will feature Yuja Wang playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Anyone have a hook-up?
Here is something positive for once. There is a growing trend across the U.S. of musicians performing in hospitals, memory care centers, and senior living facilities, The New York Times reports. These arts programs can lead to a demonstrated improvement in the overall wellbeing of many patients and in the wellbeing of burnt out healthcare providers. While these kinds of programs aren’t quite standardized or even the norm across the country, this is an encouraging trend that shows one more way that we can create more sustainable ways of living for artists and better care for all.
In New York, the Martha Graham Dance company has secured a new home in midtown that more than doubles its footprint, with six new dance studios and a 30-year lease. It will move into the space next year, when it celebrates its 100th anniversary; it it also plans to rent out studios to other arts groups at a discount, the NYT reported.
Across the pond, a new venue in London features six dance studios, a 550-seat auditorium, and a free public performance space. Two dance schools—one that teaches hip-hop to 16-19 year olds and another that focuses on choreography—will also have a space in the the venue, Sadler’s Wells East. The BBC calls it a “gamechanger” for dance in the capital city.
In Miami, Lourdes Lopez has stepped down from her post as artistic director of Miami City Ballet after 13 years, two years before her contract expires. Her focus going forward, she told the New York Times, will be “exploring ways for Miami arts institutions to collaborate more closely.”
Local arts groups, after all, often have to contend with greater challenges than national ones that have larger budgets and audiences. That is especially true of Khashabi Theatre, a Palestinian independent theater company based in the northern Israeli city of Haifa. Khashabi Theatre will bring its show Milk to Dublin’s Abbey Theatre later in February and describes it as “a ‘visual poem’ about motherhood, loss, time and the devastation of a tragedy,” the Sunday Times reported. The play premiered in Palestine in 2022, and also ran in both Italy and France to critical acclaim. The independent theater company does not receive any state funding.
The Irish audience, Abbey Theatre artistic director Caitríona McLaughlin says, is “interested in getting a rounded, full perspective on politics,” and she feels strongly about supporting Khashabi Theatre and its artists’ rights to express themselves. There is great value, she adds, in “allowing people the space to speak for themselves. And for me that’s a really important aspect of running a national theatre: creating space where people can reflect on something without telling them what to think.”
It is often left up to small, specialist book publishers to bring works of translation into being, and now, Tilted Axis, a British publisher that largely focuses on literature from Asia, is finally bringing a number of its titles to the United States, the New York Times reported.
The classical music radio stations are feuding in the U.K., as the BBC’s relaxing classical station, Radio 3 Unwind, launched in November—two months after Classical FM launched its “Calm” station and competitor Scala rebranded as “Magic Classical.”
While Classical FM is the U.K.’s most popular classical station, the Sunday Times reported, the BBC’s Radio 3 Unwind is threatening its popularity for one particular reason: It doesn’t have to run ads because it gets government funding. Radiocentre, the industry body for commercial radio, suggests that the BBC’s move into the “relaxing classical” genre could lead to as much as a £70 million annual loss in revenue for commercial radio. The fact that there’s such rampant competition in the easy-listening category seems to be a sign of the times. ▲