Closed For Repairs?

Donald Trump has announced that the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will be closed for "renovations" beginning July 4, 2026.

He promises that it will be better and more beautiful than before.  And Broadway star Patti LuPone, among others, are weighing in on Trump's as-yet unseen plans, with LuPone, below, worried that Trump might tear the building down, and -- 

Wait, what?

Patti LuPone actually wants to see the current Kennedy Center preserved?  Ha ha, that's the funniest thing I've heard all week!

As I have noted before on this blog, the Kennedy Center is considered one of the monumentally horrid examples of the the grandiose and pretentious examples of  post-war American architecture, known for its pompous corridors and its oversized theaters, while the performing "arts" events staged there are the sort of middlebrow entertainment that would never be allowed in halls like the Paris Opera House or la Scala.  And there's that really, really ugly - and huge - bust of John F. Kennedy that looks like someone threw mud on a wire model of a human skull until the image looked like JFK, at least just a bit.  The surest sign that no architectural standards exist in These States in these days is that people actually find no objection with the design of the current performing arts complex, a building that has sat like a giant warehouse with eaves defiling the eastern bank of the Potomac.

I rarely reproduce entire articles on this blog, but when I do, it's to make a serious point.  And so I do so now, reprinting architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable's bashing of the Kennedy Center's architecture in a review published in the New York Times on Tuesday, September 7, 1971, a day before it officially opened to the public.  It is quite trenchant.

*

This capital city specializes in ballooning monuments and endless corridors. It uses marble like cotton wool. It is the home of government of, for and by the people, and of taste for the people - the big, the bland and the banal. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, opening officially Wednesday, does not break the rule. The style of the Kennedy Center is Washington superscale, but just a little bit bigger. Albert Speer would have approved.

It has apotheosized the corridor in the 600‐foot‐long, 60‐foot‐high grand foyer (the length of three New York City blockfronts), one of the biggest rooms in the world, into which the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles could he cozily nested. It would be a super-tunnel without its saving Belgian gift of mirrors.

The corridor is “dressed up,” in the words of the architect, Edward Durell Stone, by 18 of the world's biggest crystal chandeliers, with planters and furniture still to come. There is enough red carpet for a total environment.

There are two other flag-hung, polished marble-walled, red‐carpeted, 250‐foot long and 60‐foot high corridors called the Hall of States and the Hall of Nations. They are disquietingly reminiscent of the overscaled vacuity of Soviet palaces of culture. They would be great for drag racing.

The two halls separate the three theaters that are the structure's raison d'être: the Opera House, the Concert Hall and the Eisenhower Theater. The grand foyer is the entrance to them all.

The building itself is a super-bunker, 100 feet high, 630 feet long and 300 feet wide, on the Potomac. One more like this and the city will sink.

Because it is a national landmark, there is only one way to judge the Kennedy Center - against the established standard of progressive and innovative, excellence in architectural design that this country is known and admired for internationally.

Unfortunately, the Kennedy center not only does not achieve this standard of innovative excellence; it also did not seek it. The architect opted for something ambiguously called "timelessness" and produced meaninglessness. It is to the Washington manner born. Too bad; since there is so much of it.

The center sets still another record—for architectural default. What it has in size, it lacks in distinction. Its character is aggrandized posh. It is an embarrassment to have it stand as a symbol of American artistic, achievement before the nation and the world.

The interiors aim for conventional, comfortable, gargantuan grand luxe. This is gemütlich Speer.

The Opera House, a 2,200‐seat hall with superior sightliness and equipment, looks like one of those passe, red-padded drugstore candy‐valentines.

Its dark red fabric walls are buttoned down with rows of gold knobs and its Austrian crystal lights suggest nothing so much as department store Christmas displays. To this observer, it is singularly depressing.

The 2,375‐seat Concert Hall, its acoustic wood walls painted white, has red seats and carpet and is buttoned down with Norwegian crystal fixtures. This at least is cheerful and suggests 1920s-modern.

Restaurants on the top terrace floor are in expense‐account French by way of Austria, and nearly Scandinavia. They are red.

There are two ways of defending the center's design. One, already popular, is to say that it doesn't really matter and that the only things that count are those badly needed performance halls and how they work.

But nothing justifies wrapping those halls in nearly $70 million of tasteful corn and 17,000 tons of steel -all a conscious design decision - and ignoring it. If you could ignore it, which is hard.

To say that everything else about a landmark structure of this stupefying size is irrelevant is nonsense. The emperor, unfortunately, is wearing clothes. And the world is looking.

The second defense is simply to accept the fact that the center probably represents the norm of American, taste. But it is a fallacy to equate the great middle common denomination of popular taste with the country's actual and potential level of creative achievement.

From this point of view, however, it is almost an interesting building. If Mr. Stone has been aiming for an architecture that all America can love, he has found it This is architectural populism. He has produced a conventional crowd pleaser. It is a genuine people's palace.

People have been pouring in, before the opening, through every available crack, in T‐shirts and sneakers, hot pants and Bermuda shorts, barefoot and bare-bellied, backpacking babies, tracking across the red carpet and under the chandeliers. The pre‐opening charge of elitism because of all that lush decor was rubbish. They are obviously loving it and perfectly at home.

Because it so lacks the true elegance of imagination, it does not put them off at all. They are awed by the scale and admiring of the decoration, which is a safe, familiar blend of theatrical glamour and showroom Castro Convertible.

Stringent economies have made saving simplicities, but the popular style is loud and clear.

For the more architecturally sophisticated, it is hard to admire a failure of vision and art. And it did not have to be it is not easy to commission creative courage in Washington, but it can be done, as proven by the current plans for the National Gallery extension.

It is particularly hard to know that the one creative design for a new kind of experimental theater remains an unfinished shell within the building, lacking funds.

The center was probably wrong from the start. It was conceived as a giant economy three‐in‐one package. If it hasn't cost more than three separate buildings, it certainly hasn't cost less, and it has had formidable construction problems as a result of the "simple" concept.

The three houses have had to be separated and insulated from each other for vibration and sound inside and jets outside, and from other floors and functions.

Suspension and soundproofing have been achieved through incredibly complex and expensive concrete and steelwork that belies the apparent logic of the plan. Structurally, the achievement is considerable, and economically, it is almost a bargain.

The giant steel trusses hidden behind the scenes are far more impressive, than the truly awful, gold‐epoxy‐paint-steel columns that run visibly through the building, which add decorative aluminum fins along the facades.

Environmentally, the center has been severely criticized for its setting and isolation from city life. But many Washingtonians like the idea of driving to a “safe” bastion of culture. Again, it's what people really want.

As completed, the center's plusses include its public amenities—its entrance plaza, riverfront promenade, eating facilities and outdoor terraces with views. And credit as well as sympathy must go to the dedicated and hardworking sponsors who have actually brought three major performance halls to Washington.

May all the performing arts flourish. Because the building is a national tragedy. It is a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.

*

In other words, it's the perfect populist palace for a performing "arts" complex where honors go to female rappers who got their start in show business making percussive noises with their mouths on the streets of Newark and clown-faced electric-guitar players whose band name is an accidental acronym for their "musical" style - "Keep it simple, stupid." 

Note that Albert Speer - still alive in 1971 - got mentioned twice in Huxtable's appraisal, and yes, he probably did approve.

So, yes, I say, tear it down, especially in light of the fact that a theater actress who made a name for herself playing a fascist concubine in a musical written by Western civilization's worst composer is the last person who should judge the architectural quality of the Kennedy Center.  But at least, Ms. LuPone only played a fascist concubine, which is certainly a whole lot better than being one, one now celebrated in a documentary no one wants to see.

But there's the thing.  As horrid as the Kennedy Center looks from the outside (to be fair, the interior has been renovated in the past, though I hardly see how it could be better now than when it first opened), it's probably better to wait to tear it down and replace it with something that Ada Louise Huxtable would have liked until Trump is out of office, because if he does tear it down, the new performing arts complex will probably look something like this.

In fact, it could end up being worse than this.  How?  I don't let myself think about it.    

Surrender

So many things are happening faster than I can comment on them, I figure I'd rather wait until next week just before Christmas and wrap up what will have happened up to and including Christmas Eve, because everything is turning against Trump in an accelerated fashion.  (I wanted to comment on the failure of Congress to renew Affordable Care Act subsidies, but it turns out that that story isn't over quite yet.)   And even that may not be sufficient, as Trump will likely continue committing atrocities right up to the moment the ball drops in Times Square on New Year's Eve and start committing new atrocities in 2026 without missing a beat or taking a break.  

But in the meantime, there are a few stories and topics that I must address before then.  Like the issue involving the band Cheap Trick.  

Cheap Trick played Kiss's "Rock and Roll All Nite" at the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony for Kennedy Center 2025 honorees Kiss (whom they mentioned in their signature song "Surrender"), the ceremony to be broadcast on CBS (CBS, of course!) this coming Tuesday.  Given Donald Trump's takeover of the Kennedy Center from serving as the center's board president to being the master of ceremonies at the honors ceremony, a backlash naturally ensued among Cheap Trick's more socially conscious fans, and the band quickly put out a statement on their social media accounts to explain that their appearance at the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony had nothing to do with support for Trump.

"We were asked to perform at this year’s Kennedy Center Honors ceremony to pay tribute to our lifelong brothers in Kiss, and to support artists and the arts," the band explained in a message posted on Cheap Trick’s X social-media accounts. "We agreed to do it for those reasons, and no others."

I am not one of those people who will never listen to Cheap Trick again or who will boycott their shows to protest their appearance at the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony, as I take them at their word.  But this flap just proves how wrong it is for the Kennedy Center to award honors to rock bands, and this of course is an issue that predates either of Trump's two nonconsecutive terms.  Rock and roll has long been about sticking it to the Man with the proverbial finger, and as an establishmentarian institution meant to support mainstream and highbrow performing art, the Kennedy Center is the Man in all his grandiose glory.  The fact that not only Kiss got a Kennedy Center honor but also several other rock acts in the past - including Led Zeppelin, who weren't even American - shows how respectable rock has become in the recent past.  Because Led Zeppelin, though regarded as the founding fathers of heavy metal, were based in American blues and also added touches of English folk and Jamaican reggae to their music, the Kennedy Center was able to provide an explanation - a tenuous explanation at best, but still an explanation - for why they were being honored for their contributions to the arts.   There is no obvious explanation or excuse to give a Kennedy Center honor to a band known for distorted, flamboyant noise, singing about the overt sexiness of young women (sample lyric from "Rock and Roll All Nite": "You show us everything you got / Ooh baby baby, that's quite a lot"), and generally being loud and stupid.

But, even the best rock and roll is inappropriate for a stage designed for "serious" musical performances, be it the National Symphony Orchestra's concerts or an opera, the stage being massive enough to, as  Paul Fussell wrote, support a production of Verdi's Aida with "immense heroic processions and herds of real elephants and camels, with everyone speaking - nay, singing - the best possible Italian."  Then again, maybe rock and roll isn't inappropriate for the Kennedy Center; as I've noted before, and as Fussell noted long before I did, the Kennedy Center mostly stages lowbrow entertainments, to the point where the Aida you'll see on its stage is not the Verdi opera but the Elton John-Tim Rice Broadway musical based on it.  (And, given the political correctness that permeates our culture these days, the only acceptable Continental language in this country is Spanish, the language of Latin jazz, mariachi and salsa - all of which I happen to like, by the way - whereas Italian opera is the stuff that DWEAMs - dead white European and American males - are made of.  French?  Nah, that's for pompous twits!)  Implicit in the choice of rock and rollers for Kennedy Center honors is that all art, even subversive lower-middle-class art meant as a revolt against the classical, intellectual music of the educated and overeducated classes, is worthy of equal recognition, even if the lowbrow music honored, like Kiss, is crass and vulgar, or even if the highbrow music honored is pretentious and empty.  The performing arts in general and music in particular are all democratically created in America, and thus democratically honored . . . and democratically dismal.

And it's going to get worse at the Kennedy Center if a Democrat is ever President again.  A Democratic administration will overcorrect Trump's Kennedy Center honor choices of metal meatheads and action-movie actors by honoring pop singers whom the Democratic Party's hip progressive base listens to - mostly disco divas who go by single names - and more hip-hop stars who both rap and act.  Like the rapper legally known as Dana Owens, who got a Kennedy Center honor a couple of years ago.   (Aside:  I think Owens' CBS show, the "Equalizer" reboot, got canceled because, in the age of Trump, airing an action series that shows a heavy-set black woman beating up white guys in rapid succession - at least that's what my mother said the show basically was - could get you in trouble with MAGA.  And right after that, CBS happily welcomed Bari Weiss to run its news department.)

But I need to return to my original point - it is totally and completely inappropriate to honor rock and roll at the Kennedy Center when rock and roll was and remains a street rebellion against the highbrow conventions of serious music.  But reversing course and honoring only cellists and classical pianists, especially East Asian child prodigies, is decades too late.  Hey, Bob Dylan received a Kennedy Center honor despite having famously sung that "even the President of the United States must sometimes have to stand naked." 

Dylan got the honor in 1997, the first year of President Bill Clinton's second term and the year before the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Yeah . . . 

Kiss of Death

I was never comfortable with rock and roll performers getting Kennedy Center honors, because the honors bestowed by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts - which was only named for John F. Kennedy, who found symphonies boring and preferred show tunes - because the honors were mostly (if not completely) meant for high art.  For music, that would mean classical music or other musical forms that aspire to high art, like jazz.  Rock and roll is not high art, and when it tries to be, the results can be pretty pretentious, as Emerson, Lake and Palmer proved trying to cover Mussorgsky or Copland.   I remember when Led Zeppelin got Kennedy Center honors, which made no sense at all because they were British, and the award was meant for contributions to the American arts - which, of course, means no rap, because rap isn't art, but rappers have gotten Kennedy Center honors too.   Someone like Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees, who was also honored . . . well, he and his brothers were more pop than rock, and he's sort of a de facto American, having lived in Miami for fifty years . . . that would be a coin toss.

A lot of Kennedy Center honors went to performers who didn't deserve it before Trump returned to power, but now that he's back and he's made himself chairman of the board of trustees and appointed noted patrons of the arts such as Laura Ingraham, Maria Bartiromo (this just in - she still can't talk), Usha Vance, Lee Greenwood, Dan Scavino, Susie Wiles, and Susie Wiles' stepmother . . . well, the choices for Kennedy Center honors for 2025 were expected to be very plebian.  And in that respect, the board of trustees did not disappoint, choosing to give Kennedy Center honors this year to no greater than five artistes, the main headliner being . . . Kiss!

Kiss!

Kiss, the infamous heavy-metal band famous for their painted masks (which they hid behind for nearly a decade), their loud, piercing riffs, their stupid misogynistic lyrics, and even the odd disco song! 

I can't think of anyone less deserving than these talentless clowns to be given a Kennedy Center honor, and remember, rappers have gotten them.  The honoring of a band whose songwriting never caused John Lennon and Paul McCartney or Elton John and Bernie Taupin to fret over their reputations as composers and whose entire stage act would have crumbled into a million pieces without their special effects because of their lack of genuine charisma is a slap in the face to everyone who worked for a national performing arts center to serve as a showcase for the best and greatest of the American performing arts.

And that's precisely the point.  The people on the board who supported Kiss are, in addition to being haters of symphonies and operas, likely the same snotnose teenage boys who bought all their records back in the 1970s - even the solo albums - and want to get revenge on the "woke" honorees of years past as well as the previous trustees who quite smartly turned up their noses at their favorite performers.  I was a tween back then - the girls in the Kiss Army were even more insufferable.

Also getting an honor is Sylvester Stallone, whose fame rests entirely on his roles as Rocky Balboa and John Rambo.  Okay, Stallone isn't as bad an actor as people think, and he actually got some good reviews for Cop Land and reprising his role as Rocky Balboa in the Creed movies.  But name another picture other than the Rocky and Rambo movies that garnered a lot of attention - Paradise Alley is not acceptable - and you'll see that his contributions to cinema, be it as an actor or director, are as thin as porridge.  

Oh yeah, there was Death Race 2000, the dystopian road-race B-movie that gave Stallone and Fred Grandy a path to mainstream success but not Roberta Collins, who should have graduated to A-list movies and, had she done so, would have given the sort of performances in serious films that could have gotten her a Kennedy Center honor had she lived (she would have been 81 today).  

As for the others . . . there's country singer George Strait, for the MAGA redneck types who don't like heavy metal. a performer described as the King of Country (actually, Johnny Cash was the King of Country, but let that pass), and actor Michael Crawford - a Brit? - primarily for him originating the lead role in The Phantom of the Opera, one of those schlocky Andrew Lloyd Webber works that Trump himself likes.  Okay, I can take or leave those guys, and Crawford deserves points for his role in the anti-war black comedy  How I Won the War, which also starred John Lennon (although that movie, as much as I enjoyed it, was thoroughly British).  But I cannot, for the life of me, understand the honor disco singer Gloria Gaynor, best known for her hit "I Will Survive" and her hit cover of the Jackson 5's "Never Can Say Goodbye."  That's it.  Make those two songs a double A-side, and you instantly have Gloria Gaynor's greatest-hits compilation.  As she is a black woman, I can only guess that she's a DEI honoree, brought to you by the folks who brought you anti-DEI policies.

No, Kiss remain the biggest insult to the idea of of honoring the best and the most accomplished of those in the performing arts, as they are all performance and no art.  Kind of like Trump.  But at this point, it's worth remembering that the Kennedy Center has long been a venue primarily for light-pop entertainment and touring stage companies.  The National Symphony Orchestra doesn't pack them in like the usual acts at the venue, and Washington isn't exactly known for having prestigious dance or opera companies that are the envy of America.  Honoring modern-dance choreographers or cellists at the Kennedy Center embodies who we want to be.  Honoring a heavy-metal band known for a fire-breathing, blood-drooling bass player and for song titles like "Lick It Up" shows us who we really are.

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.

No Laughing Matter

Adam Sandler has been awarded the Mark Twain Prize for Humor at the Kennedy Center in Washington.

Adam Sandler?  Really?

That's like awarding Vladimir Putin the Nobel Peace Prize.

It's official: Washington, D.C. has no culture.