Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

OH NO! Trump Is Toppling A Work Of Art Outside The Kennedy Center! Democrats Would NEVER Take Down…Oh. Right.

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Well, I’ll say this for my Trump Deranged Facebook Friends: they are useful for keeping up on that group’s rapidly progressing mental illness, which exhibits symptoms manifesting constant fury over trivia, obsessive behavior, presumptions of certitude, and loss of all perspective. Oh, and hypocrisy! Mustn’t forget hypocrisy.

My friend the Trump Deranged professor posted this today with favor:

“Today, a permanent artistic gift—Joel Shapiro’s “Blue”—was taken from the nation because Donald Trump didn’t like it.

“September 18, join Hands Off the Arts to raise your voice and make sure Trump pays the political price for his vandalism of John F. Kennedy’s memorial and our nation’s cultural center.”

I’m marking my calendar right now!

The alleged vandalism was Trump’s ordered removal of the ugly thing above, which, since I started personally boycotting the monument to one of our most unethical Presidents and his corrupt family dynasty that included a U.S. Senator who left a young woman to die in a submerged car, I had never seen before. Huh. Is the outrage over Trump getting rid of that piece of blue crap more contrived than the fury over the 250th Commemorative coin, or less?

In a risible report, the New York Times informs us that “Blue” is a “towering artwork.” And it fit so well with the neo-Classical style of the Edward Durrell Stone white marble box-shaped Center, too!

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts removed a major outdoor sculpture from the center’s grounds on Wednesday. The work, installed in 2019, was targeted for elimination after President Trump’s takeover of the center, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times.

The Kennedy Center made no advance announcement of its plans to remove the towering, vivid blue metal sculpture of a stick-like human figure, called “Blue.”

On Wednesday morning, the limbs and torso of the figure were wrapped in protective material; an arm was the first to be removed.

The Kennedy Center confirmed in a statement on Tuesday that the sculpture was being deinstalled and that a foundation dedicated to the artist would determine its next location. It did not say the reason for the removal but noted that the deinstallation of artworks that had been donated or lent was common practice for conservation or preservation purposes.

A news release from around the debut of “Blue” describes it as a permanent sculpture for the grounds.

“We are deeply grateful to Joel Shapiro for the years ‘Blue’ has spent animating our campus and connecting visitors to his vision,” the statement said. “We are honored to have been stewards of his vibrant work and a part of his enduring legacy.”

Mr. Shapiro died in 2025. His daughter, Ivy Shapiro, who is president of his foundation, said in an interview that she thought her father would have been “alarmed” that the sculpture was being taken down from its intended location.

“In Joel’s mind, it was one of his greatest site-specific commissions, which celebrated joy, freedom and creativity,” she said.

Hear! Hear! I know I’ve always seen giant metal stick figures as celebrations of joy, freedom and creativity. Not as much as those inflated wiggly-men, of course, but still.

If there is one thing I do not care to hear knee-jerk progressives bleat about in their ravings, it is President Trump removing a single ugly artwork from the grounds of a public building because “he didn’t like it.” In this case the President showed exquisite taste (for a change) but even if the thing weren’t a big blue metal stick figure, the reason “It stinks!” is still a brilliantly-reasoned critique compared to the Axis and Friends removing over 160 statues from public grounds …

…because a black lifetime petty thug died after an accidental use of excessive force by a Minnesota police officer while he was resisting arrest and over-dosing on drugs.

The hypocrisy—and willful blindness to it—exhibited in this latest episode of “Everything Trump Does Is Terrible And Justifies Impeachment If Not Death!” is…I need a new adjective for “beyond belief.” Let’s see…it looks like I use all of them, and the Thesaurus list doesn’t even include “gobsmacking,” “head-exploding” or the phase that keeps jumping into my mind right now, “so fucking stupid it makes my pancreas whimper.” I guess I’ll go with the Cambridge Dictionary’s more dignified and restrained “impossible to comprehend.”

The “Who Cares?” Anti-Trump Judicial Ruling Of Them All

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Even Trump doesn’t care, raising the question of why it’s such a big deal to the Trump Deranged. From the Washington Post:

“A federal judge issued a ruling this week temporarily blocking key parts of President Donald Trump’s effort to transform the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, throwing the institution’s future into a state of uncertainty…He installed himself as the Kennedy Center’s board chair and brought in loyalists as trustees who voted last year to add his name to the building. Programming priorities shifted, acts have withdrawn or dropped out, ticket sales plummeted and more than 100 employees resigned or were laid off.

“In March, the board agreed to Trump’s plan to close the center for a two-year renovation. But U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper on Friday granted in part a request from Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), temporarily blocking steps toward the closure. He also ordered Kennedy Center officials to remove Trump’s name from the center’s building and branding.

“…Cooper has ordered the removal of Trump’s name from the building’s white exterior wall, a little more than five months after it was installed when the board, stacked by Trump with those loyal to him, voted to rename the institution “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” They have two weeks to remove it and scrap references to it from the website.

“Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name,” Cooper wrote in his opinion, “and only Congress can change it.”

That’s nice. I’m sure all of my friends and colleagues in the arts community will be happy now. Actually no, I know they won’t. My Trump Deranged friends and colleagues have made it quite clear that they won’t be happy until Donald J. Trump is dead and hanging like a pinata on a tree somewhere, and can be pelted with rotten fruit by people screaming like banshees. Ann Althouse this morning raised a fascinating conspiracy theory regrading “What’s going on here?” Her take: “I’m going to assume he didn’t want to fix this place, and the best — or most entertaining — way to avoid blame for letting it rot was to bait a judge into preventing him from saving it.”

Actually, he did more than that. When the President put his name on the building, it naturally caused the infants in the arts community to cut off their metaphorical noses to spite their faces. After duly noting how silly the re-naming of the building was in this post, I wrote in this one:

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On the Kennedy Center Boycotts

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

My Facebook friends are almost unanimously calling for audiences to boycott Kennedy Center performances because they hate Donald Trump so much, and view his name being added to the Kennedy Center facade a just cause to…What? Destroy the arts in order to save them?

The boycott, which is taking hold because D.C.’s arts patrons are overwhelmingly wealthy, woke Democrats, is certain to have negative effect on audiences and artists. The National Symphony Orchestra, to name one boycott target, is hanging by a thread financially already. It has no other venue open to it. But the boycotters literally don’t care. Their aim is to grandstand, signal their virtue, and declare their intractable opposition to the elected President of the United States.

Artists are also engaging in this destructive and illogical protest. The Cookers, an “all-star jazz septet that will ignite the Terrace Theater stage with fire and soul” and a New York dance company canceled scheduled appearances at the Kennedy Center on New Years Eve, so as with the annual Christmas Eve jazz concert hosted by Chuck Redd that also canceled at the last minute, audiences looking forward to the event are being punished as proxies for the hated POTUS. How these protests have any impact on President Trump has yet to be explained.

The Cookers, in a statement, said, “Jazz was born from struggle and from a relentless insistence on freedom: freedom of thought, of expression, and of the full human voice.” Oh. Doug Varone and Dancers, a New York dance company, announced that it was canceling two performances in April. Varone, the head of the company, said it would lose $40,000 by pulling out, but that “It is financially devastating but morally exhilarating.”

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Oh Great. “Hamilton” Again. Where’s Aaron Burr When You Need Him?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

I haven’t seen “Hamilton” yet, which is embarrassing for me, as I consider it my duty to try to keep abreast of theatrical phenomena with cultural implications. I thought I would finally see Lin-Manuel Miranda’s creative re-imagining of the life of one of America’s most important Founders with an all “of-color” ensemble singing rap next year when the touring company had a scheduled month-long run at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., but no. The touring company announced that it is canceling the gig, which had been scheduled to be part of the Kennedy Center’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The show and its creator are throwing a tantrum, punishing the audiences of the Washington D.C. area because Donald Trump is Hitler, or something.

President removed Democratic members from the Center’s board, became its (temporary) chairman and replaced the venue’s president, so the uniformly leftist cast and production company decided to boycott the place. Well, you know, theater types…

“This latest action by Trump means it’s not the Kennedy Center as we knew it,” Lin-Manuel Miranda, who originated the title role on Broadway, said in an interview last week. “The Kennedy Center was not created in this spirit, and we’re not going to be a part of it while it is the Trump Kennedy Center. We’re just not going to be part of it.”

The show’s producer, Jeffrey Seller, whined that Trump “took away our national arts center for all of us.” “It became untenable for us to participate in an organization that had become so deeply politicized,” he said. “The Kennedy Center is for all of us, and it pains me deeply that they took it over and changed that. They said it’s not for all of us. It’s just for Donald Trump and his crowd. So we made a decision we can’t do it.”

The claimed justification for this hissy-fit insults the intelligence of Democrats and Republican alike. The Kennedy Center has, since its opening in 1964 as a memorial to the assassinated President John F. Kennedy, been a stronghold of Democratic power-brokers and liberals in general and the Kennedy family in particular, whose members and allies have always controlled the place. Although its inception was an order by President Dwight Eisenhower calling for a non-political arts venue in the Nation’s Capital, once the three theater complex was under the control of the Democratic Party’s First Family, bi-partisanship got the hook.

The “Hamilton” Axis allies had some gall referring to the Kennedy Center as apolitical and “neutral.” Nothing is neutral in Washington. I experienced first-hand the partisan influence of the Center when my theater company in nearby Arlington, VA. presented the premiere of a drama, “The Titans,” about the Cuban Missile Crisis. It had originally been slated to be presented at the Kennedy Center, but was vetoed by the Center’s board when the Kennedy family protested that the script was not sufficiently supportive of the myth that it was JKF who saved the world from nuclear war (rather than the one who almost blundered us into it).

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There Are Worse Things Than Racism, Part I: The Tina Fey Dilemma

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

The Kennedy Center embarrassed itself in 2010, giving an affirmative action (gender division) honor to Tina Fey. She received its Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which the Center has awarded every year since 1998 to individuals who have “had an impact on American society in ways similar to” Twain…you know, like Tina Fey.

The Center realized that it was short on female honorees (because humor, historically and now, is a field dominated by men), and because it can only give the award to the living, so it settled on Fey as a weaker than weak addition to the pantheon. I compared the award at the time to Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize and added,

If she vanished tomorrow, Tina Fey would at best be a footnote in the history of American comedy. Her qualifications for the Mark Twain Prize in 2010 appear to be 1) she is a woman, and there aren’t many women in comedy 2) she is a comedian, though not an especially funny one, 3) she is a writer, though neither of the screenplays she has authored would be called deathless classics, unless you think “Mean Girls” is on par with “Adam’s Rib,” and 4) she looks like Sarah Palin, which allowed her to do a popular impression mocking Palin during the 2008 campaign, and the people who give out the award really, really dislike Sarah Palin.

In short, she didn’t deserve the award in the first place, and the Mark Twain Prize lost its integrity and credibility by her receiving it. Thus there is some condign justice in that decision coming back to bite the Kennedy Center now, along with a second bad decision eight years later.

That year, the Kennedy Center decided to rescind Bill Cosby’s Mark Twain Prize, which the Cos had more than earned in 2009. Cosby did have impact on culture and humor comparable to Twain, and his achievements dwarf those of Fey like “War and Peace” dwarfs “Valley of the Dolls.” Again virtue-signaling to feminists, the Kennedy Center revoked Cosby’s honor after his conviction for sexual assault (which was just accepted for appeal this week).

I didn’t write about it at the time, I guess because there was nothing new to say that I hadn’t said in this post, where I observed,

[L]ast I heard Bill Cosby was still recognized as a major trailblazer in stand-up, TV comedy, and television integration (remember “I Spy”?), an important positive cultural force for race relations and black community self esteem, and a spectacularly talented comedian with a unique voice and presence. None of that has changed. Those were the achievements that prompted Cosby’s bust’s inclusion in Disney’s Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame Plaza, along with celebrities such as Lucille Ball and Oprah Winfrey who, like the Cos, have been inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame. O.J. Simpson is still honored in the College Football Hall of Fame, because he was one of the greatest college stars ever. His post-career hobby as a murderer, like Bill’s extra-curricular activities as a serial rapist, have nothing to do with the honor, just as Cosby earned and still deserves, his honor for what he achieved on stage and screen.

That still applied in 2018, and it is true today.

But Bill was deemed unworthy nonetheless. Now, in the midst of the George Floyd Freakout, the frenzied statue-toppling, cancelling-happy, race-offense vengeance-obsessed mob has targeted Tina Fey. During her acclaimed NBC show “30 Rock,” which she created, often wrote, and appeared in, blackface was used for comic effect four times. This week, always seeking to follow the crowd, Fey said her mea culpas and had Hulu pull the shows from circulation, thus putting herself in the cross hairs. (I must note that this censorship, like all censorship, impedes knowledge and reflection, since it is impossible to assess what the use of blackface was. I never watched the show because mega-ass Alec Baldwin was a regular, and I would prefer chewing off my fingers than supporting anything he’s involved in.) Continue reading →