What's going on at the Kennedy Center

Plus, Sophocles is so hot right now.

Hello. Since the last time we spoke, I have:

• Read Natalia Ginzburg’s 1952 novel All Our Yesterdays, and now I really only want to read post-war Italian literature.

• Have continued HBO’s My Brilliant Friend (now on season three).

• Had a very staying-in sort of week after the previous week’s packed cultural calendar. I’m thinking about getting a last-minute ticket to see NYCB’s Firebird this week; I have some FOMO about not going to the premiere of Alexei Ratmansky’s Paquita. Akram Khan’s Gigenis at the Joyce should also be really good—I think of his version of Giselle for English National Ballet on a semi-regular basis.

• Hit a little milestone of 500 subscribers with this newsletter—thank you for reading!

Now, the news. There is…a lot!

The Meeting by Pietro Longhi (1746)

Things have escalated at the Kennedy Center, with Trump announcing that he will fire members of the board of trustees before their six-year terms are up and install himself as chairman. On top of that, he says he will also be in charge of programming at the national cultural center, which opened in 1971. The Kennedy Center gets an annual federal appropriation for “capital repairs and operations and maintenance” of its building; for the fiscal year 2025, it had requested $45.73 million from Congress, which approves this expenditure. Of course, amount does not cover any of the programming that the Center puts on annually. According to ProPublica, the Kennedy Center reported $280 million in expenses and $286 million in revenue in 2023; for comparison, New York City’s Lincoln Center reported more than $196.6 million in expenses in 2022 and about $235 million in revenue.

The Kennedy Center makes up the rest of its budget much like other cultural institutions: Donors, grants, and ticket revenue. This is all to say that the Center’s more than 400 annual free events, more than 1,5000 performances and activities, and Social Impact programs that reach more than 24,000 people and nearly 1,700 artists annually are entirely funded by the private sector.

Naturally, the question arises: Can the President just…do that? The Kennedy Center put out a statement on Saturday that reads, in part:

The Kennedy Center is aware of the post made recently by POTUS on social media. We have received no official communications from the White House regarding changes to our board of trustees. We are aware that some members of our board have received termination notices from the administration.

Per the Center’s governance established by Congress in 1958, the chair of the board of trustees is appointed by the Center’s board members. There is nothing in the Center’s statute that would prevent a new administration from replacing board members; however, this would be the first time such action has been taken with the Kennedy Center’s board.

The President does appoint the board members of the Kennedy Center, who serve six-year terms. But there’s no precedent for termination of those terms. In December, President Biden appointed 13 new board members, and Kennedy Center president Deborah F. Rutter said she would step down later in 2025, though that wasn’t a decision that was influenced by the incoming administration. “This is not related to the politics of who’s in the White House,” she told the Washington Post. “The Kennedy Center is truly nonpartisan.”

You might recall at the Kennedy Center had already been in a bit of a flux. Chairman David M. Rubenstein was prepared to step down from his position last January, but in November, the board announced that he’d remain in his position until 2026, as the search for his replacement—which began in May—was taking longer than expected. In December, Rutter told the New York Times that the Center was in the quiet phase of an endowment campaign and as such, she said, “It is important for us to have somebody who knows the Center…and can play the leadership role that we need.”

Trump, for his part, broke with presidential tradition in his first term and did not once attend the annual Kennedy Center Honors, which recognize five honorees each year for their contributions to the performing arts and American culture. The awards have been given since 1978, with honorees including George Balanchine, Ella Fitzgerald, Martha Graham, Jerome Robbins, Harry Belafonte, Ginger Rogers, Stephen Sondheim, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Dolly Parton, Diana Ross, Philip Glass, and last year: Francis Ford Coppola, the Grateful Dead, Bonnie Raitt, Arturo Sandoval, and the Apollo Theater.

So has Trump taken a sudden interest in the performing arts? I wouldn’t say so. The Atlantic first reported the news of Trump’s Kennedy Center takeover on Friday, and he confirmed the news on Truth Social. He wrote that he was terminating multiple trustees (though he didn’t say who, aside from chair Rubenstein) “who do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.”

It’s worth pointing out that much of Trump’s relationship to the arts is driven by malice. We spoke last week about how he dissolved the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, a group that in his first term disbanded in protest of his comments regarding white nationalist terrorism in Charlottesville. He holds a similar grudge with the Kennedy Center: the reason he never attended its annual Awards is because in 2017, three out of five of the honorees—Norman Lear, Lionel Richie, and Carmen de Lavallade—said they would boycott for the same reason.

But we have already seen that this Trump administration is more emboldened than last time, and this seizure of the nation’s theater—home to the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera—could further its crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s far easier to imagine what a Trump-controlled Kennedy Center wouldn’t do than what it would do; he has already promised to prohibit drag performances, which the Center did put on with Trump-appointed board members, even during his first term. It’s the same playbook Florida governor Ron DeSantis used when he vetoed the state’s $32 million arts budget last year, claiming that taxpayer money was paying for “sexual” festivals.

Social impact is at the core of the Kennedy Center’s mission; its aim is to “dismantle real and perceived barriers between ‘fine arts communities’ and the richly diverse communities…in the nation’s capital.” To that aim, the Center promotes multivocality in its performances and educational programming. Its already-announced slate of social impact programming for 2025 includes a celebration of World Pride in June, several commissions by Black composers and librettists for the Washington National Opera and the National Symphony Orchestra through The Cartography Project—a program “dedicated to mapping Black dignity through music”—and free dance classes, catering to diverse dance styles, through Dance Sanctuaries.

It’s uncertain what will happen next with the Center, should Trump succeed in taking full control, and it’s especially unclear how such a shift could impact the Center’s ability to fundraise, given its dependence on private donations. And with its 2025 season already in full swing, some artists are less than happy about how this administration could impact their upcoming performances. “Come see me at the @kennedycenter next week before Tr*mp takes over,” wrote American Ballet Theatre principal James Whiteside on Instagram regarding ABT’s upcoming D.C. debut of Crime and Punishment, punctuating the sentiment with a green, ill-faced emoji.

If you’ve been wondering what will happen to the National Endowment for the Arts, here is your answer. The Endowment said on Thursday that it would eliminate its “Challenge America” program, which “supports projects that extend the reach of the arts to underserved groups/communities.” Eligible applicants, who could have received $10,000 each as a cut of $2.8 million total in funding, included 501(c)(3) organizations, state and local governments, federally recognized tribal communities or tribes, and applicants that hadn’t received funding from the NEA’s other grant programs in the previous years.

Last year, Challenge America distributed $2.7 million in grants to organizations including Maryland Youth Ballet, to support “dance classes for children with physical and developmental disabilities,” Prison Performing Arts in Saint Louis, Missouri, to present an adaptation of Little Women made in collaboration with incarcerated artists, and Three River Arts Council in Wahpeton, North Dakota, to support a Native artists residency program. The NEA distributed nearly $36.8 million in funding last quarter across all of its grant-giving areas.

Axios first reported this scoop late on Thursday, and said that this year, the NEA will prioritize projects that “encourage projects that celebrate the nation's rich artistic heritage and creativity by honoring the semiquincentennial of the United States of America," according to an email the agency sent to arts organizations nationwide.

This decision coincides with an executive order, signed on January 29, to create a task force “in anticipation of the 250th anniversary of American Independence on July 4, 2026.” This White House task force will be led by the President and Vice President, and interestingly, it will be housed in the Department of Defense, which is providing its funding and administrative support. This executive order also reinstates three of Trump’s orders from his first term, which Biden struck down in 2021: all have to do with “building and rebuilding monuments of American heroes,” and “protecting America’s monuments from vandalism.” Included in these orders are plans to build a “National Garden of American Heroes,” with statues of individuals who will be chosen “for embodying the American spirit of daring and defiance, excellence and adventure, courage and confidence, loyalty and love.”

It’s unclear if Trump’s revived plan will feature the same “Heroes” that his original executive order—made just two days before Biden’s 2021 inauguration—included. It is a somewhat baffling mix that does include cultural trailblazers such as Maria Tallchief, Aretha Franklin, and Duke Ellington, and even The Origins of Totalitarianism author Hannah Arendt. Axios reported in 2021 that 73 percent of the 244-name list were men. Historian Michael Beschloss told the outlet at the time, “No president of the United States or federal government has any business dictating us citizens who our historical heroes should be. This is not Stalin’s Russia.” He added: “Many of the people on this list of ‘heroes’ would be embarrassed to be singled out by someone like Donald Trump.”

George Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze (1851)

It is worth thinking about how art can be a tool for political ideology. Consider, for a moment, Emanuel Leutze’s epic 1851 painting Washington Crossing the Delaware, which has become one of the most emblematic images of American independence from the British; it is also a painting that chooses to foreground some figures over others. As Washington is flanked by his men, there appears to be one figure to his left, whose face is obscured, who some art historians believe to be a Black enslaved man named Prince Whipple, who worked as the bodyguard and aid of his enslaver, William Whipple—a Revolutionary colonel and signer of the Declaration of Independence. Many Black soldiers fought in the Revolution with a promise from their enslavers that they’d be granted their freedom upon victory, but those terms were sparingly honored, Emily Sun wrote in a blog post for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2019.

It’s understandable why so many artists went on to create their own interpretations of Leutze’s iconic painting, like Jacob Lawrence’s 1954 Struggle Series—No. 10: Washington Crossing the Delaware, which “privileg[es] unknown men” and “creates a stark contrast to the popular narrative celebrating the hero-genius Washington.” Countless contemporary artists have also offered their take on the image, Alexxa Gotthardt reported for Artsy in 2020, such as Kara Walker with her 2017 work The Crossing—inspired directly by Trump’s 2017 inauguration—and Robert Colescott’s satirical George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook (1975), which directly comments on and condemns racist stereotypes of Black Americans.

Who defines what patriotism should look like? We should be exceedingly worried when one voice—and one harmful, narcissistic perspective—overpowers the many.

Meanwhile, those forces in power are busy scrubbing away history. The National Cryptologic Museum covered plaques honoring "Trailblazers in U.S. Cryptologic History”—women and people of color who served in the NSA—with paper, NPR reported; they have since been uncovered and the Museum says the move was a “mistake,” driven by Trump’s unclear directive terminating federal DEI inclusion. NASA has also reportedly scrubbed a blog post about a Latina woman, Rose Ferreira, who interned at the agency in 2022 after teaching herself English at 17 and overcoming homelessness.

An update on the book ban front: Publishers Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Sourcebooks filed a lawsuit last week suing the state of Idaho for its book-banning law HB 710, which we spoke about a few weeks ago.

In Nebraska, a bill that would require public school districts to create public catalogs of all school library books and to allow parents or guardians to get automatic email notifications about any book their child checks out, has advanced in the state legislature.

Aside from that, understaffed librarians are already being overwhelmed by what appear to be AI-generated books entering their digital catalogs, 404 Media reported last week. Emanuel Maiberg found multiple titles through OverDrive and Hoopla—the two most common ebook lending services for public libraries, which have different business models—that are clearly AI-generated; their authors are untraceable and often have clearly fake photos, their copy is stilted, and their covers often have typos.

While AI-generated information is not always dangerous by nature, librarians told Maiberg that this onslaught of “slop” has made it harder for library patrons to find the information they need (and it could also mean they are uncovering false or even dangerous information). While most librarians don’t say that these books must be removed from circulation, they do insist that they should, at the very least, be labeled as AI-generated.

What does the U.S. look like to everyone else in the world? A new exhibit at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum can give you an idea. “American Photography,” which showcases more than 200 works, “presents the country as seen through the eyes of American photographers” including Nan Goldin, Diane Arbus, and Andy Warhol. A key theme of the exhibit, which Dutch curators Mattie Boom and Hans Rooseboom put together, is the American dream. But photography, like all art forms, is as much about its subject as it is about its perspective—which comes with all its own inherent biases and assumptions. As a result, the exhibit reflects both the “idyllic depiction and the reality” of American life, the curators told the New York Times.

Cultural budget squeezes are continuing to hit Europe, first in Germany, and now in France. The country has cut about €150 million to its culture ministry, which includes spending on education and research; local councils have lost €2.2 billion in state subsidies, which has led some regions to make cuts as high as 70 percent percent to arts and culture spending, The Art Newspaper reported. The Académie des beaux-arts, which defines its mission as contributing “to the defense and promotion of the French artistic heritage and to its development, while respecting the pluralism of expression,” published a letter denouncing the “violence” of these cuts. The body wrote:

In the world as it is, the place of the arts and artists in our society must be ensured. It is a matter of the development of each individual and the happiness of all. Denying this necessity and no longer giving ourselves the means to ensure it is contributing to the development of the threats hanging over our democracy which feeds on the societal benefits provided by the performing arts, alongside the discovery of our tangible and intangible heritage.

Times are also tough in New York, as the Brooklyn Museum cut more than 40 employees (more than 10 percent of its workforce) and said that it will scale back to nine, rather than 12 annual exhibits. Senior leadership will also take pay cuts between 10-20 percent. The museum says that the cuts are necessary in order to realign expenses to revenue, which has remained slow post-pandemic, the New York Times reported.

In Alabama, the only museum focused on the history and culture of the Gulf of Mexico—The National Maritime Museum of the Gulf of Mexico—is contending with Trump’s executive order to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to “the Gulf of America.” This comes less than a year after the museum had a significant (nearly $100,000) rebrand from its former name, GulfQuest Maritime Museum. “My personality is to laugh,” museum director Karen Poth told the BBC. “Or else you cry.” Another name change does not seem to be in the cards.

Well here is some nice news: A new museum in Mexico City, Museo Vivo del Muralismo, features more than 3,000 square meters of murals by Mexican artists, such as Diego Rivera and Roberto Montenegro. “The challenge was to create a historical and thematic narrative of the murals for all audiences while recognizing the contributions of other artists, including women,” Mercedes Sierra, a researcher who helped develop the museum’s display text, told The Art Newspaper. The museum features early Mesoamerican art, as well as contemporary murals that express political commentary.

You may have heard about the 311-year-old Stradivarius violin—made by Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari in 1714 and later used by 19th-century violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim—which sold for $11.25 million at Sotheby’s on Friday. But you may be pleased to learn that the sale, which went to an anonymous buyer, will endow a scholarship program at the New England Conservatory, the New York Times reported.

Sophocles is so hot right now in London’s West End theaters, where there is currently a production of Oedipus Rex (starring Rami Malek) and Elektra (starring Brie Larsen). So why now? It may be sheer coincidence of programming, Guardian chief culture writer Charlotte Higgins says, but also, it makes a lot of sense: “Greek plays go to extremes. We need that: we live in extreme times.”

All of the bookstores in the vicinity of the Los Angeles wildfires are thankfully left standing—and in the aftermath of the disaster, they’ve become even more essential to the local community. The LA Times reports that shops, such as Flintridge Bookstore and Vroman’s Bookstore have become a critical third-space for people to gather, mourn what’s been lost, and support one another. Many have started book drives to restock school libraries; one anonymous donor even bought a $1,000 gift card to indie bookstore Diesel so that any child who requests a book can get it.

Love it or hate it, Penguin Random House is trying to get the BookTok set to read Jane Austen with its forthcoming romcom-inspired covers of six Austen novels, each with an introduction by a YA romance novelist. Unsurprisingly, there is some uproar about the redesigns, but I’m kind of like…whatever works, I suppose. In any case, it does spark an interesting question: what should a Jane Austen novel cover look like? LitHub did a fun survey of some previous covers—I’m particularly partial to a good old Penguin Classic.

The best book covers today are usually designed by Na Kim, who is the art director of The Paris Review and the creative director at the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She has a gallery exhibition on in New York till February 22 and a new profile in the NYT Styles section.

I’m just going to leave this here: Andrea Long Chu on Pamela Paul. ▲