The Arts Get Trumped

Donald Trump just hijacked the Kennedy Center.

Trump just fired everyone on the board of the John F. Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts and made himself the arts complex's director, putting himself in charge of the programming for the nation's performing arts venue.

Once again, Trump is emulating Hitler, who enforced his own artistic tastes and values by force, encouraging art to reflect classical values and be comprehensible to average people as well as aim toward the heroic and the romantic.  The Nazis had detested the modern, exciting art trends of the Weimar Republic to be degenerate and distasteful, and architectural trends of the Weimar era were also held in suspicion; Hitler shut down the Bauhaus studio for its radical approach to architecture. 

An example of Nazi artistic values is painter Adolf Wissel’s 1939 work Farm Family from Kahlenberg (above), depicting what was considered the ideal German family in the eyes of the Nazis - blond hair, blue eyes, stoically conservative.  As art critic Ginny Dawe-Woodings has pointed out, "Militarism and male dominance were prominent themes, as was family life, often depicting strictly defined gender roles. Dawe-Woodings pointed to Farm Family from Kahlenberg as indicative of these themes.  "This division of gender roles is exemplified in [this painting, a] portrait of a seemingly idyllic Aryan family. The father appears behind the rest of the family casting a somewhat detached but domineering eye over his brood, a grandmother knits, children play and, at the center, the mother comforts the youngest child."

Musical performances were no different in messaging.  German musical concerts from the Nazi period tended to offer bombastic classical music to light middlebrow fare extolling the virtues of the state.  "Foreign" musical ideas - American jazz, any music written by Jews - were shunned.

All that said, I really don't worry or care about a Trump-run Kennedy Center.  I have noted how the building himself was criticized for seemingly emulating the work of Nazi architect Albert Speer.  I have already cited the numerous middlebrow music and theater offerings at the nation's performing "arts" venue, as well as the penchant for giving its honor citations to hack entertainers, as well as American rappers and British (?) heavy-metal bands.  Trump's own tastes are hardly refined - he likes the Village People, for Pete's sake - but an "arts" center programmed by Trump can't do any worse than they've been doing.

I just hope Trump doesn't take over as curator of the National Gallery of Art.  Because if he does, every paining or sculpture in that museum is going to be a photo or illustration of either Trump or any of his family members.

Say what you will about noted fine-arts thief Hermann Göring, he had better taste in art.