In one of my recent articles in this publication, I mused about the fate of the arts under a future democratic or Trumpian administration. I worried that the Trump tax cuts instituted in 2017 and scheduled to end in 2025 would likely not end and that those tax cuts would further retard arts funding (the more the tax cuts, the fewer the arts contributions). I mentioned that while Trump tried to do away with the NEA, the 2017 Congress saved it but was also concerned about its fate and that of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And I wrote:
“As our differences over sexual orientation, race, and religion have intensified, we can only imagine the negative effect a Trump administration will have on the artists, boards, arts leaders, and rank and file of our arts organizations.” I thought I would sound an alarm by overstating the challenges—boy, did I get it wrong!
A friend wrote to me yesterday saying, “As a headhunter for large performing arts centers, don’t you think it will be difficult recruiting the next CEO to the Kennedy Center now that Trump is taking on the Chairmanship?” My irreverent but scarily realistic answer is, “There are plenty of people at Fox News who would be perfect for the job.”
The Kennedy Center is one of the most prominent and prolific performing arts organizations in the United States. It presents over 2,000 events annually and influences an infrastructure of traveling arts—opera, Broadway, and arts education programs. With a new board hand-picked by Trump and a new president and CEO hand-picked by that board, we can anticipate a populist palette of presentations.
Masha Gessen reminded us in a New York Times opinion piece (NY Times, February 8, 2025) about what the Yale historian Timothy Snyder has called “anticipatory obedience.” In his 2017 book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” lesson No. 1 was “Do not obey in advance.” Snyder wrote that those who anticipate the demands of a repressive government and submit to them before they are made are “teaching power what it can do.” And so, when the National Gallery of Art removes its DEI statements from its operations and the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), Americans for the Arts, or American Alliance of Museums utter not a peep, and universities and likely other arts organizations begin to remove DEI statements or quietly soft-pedal their approach to DEI, “they are obeying in advance.” Trump’s forays into fascism will likely empower Governor DeSantis of Florida (where arts funding will now be limited to those “activities and programs that are appropriate for all age groups”) and Texas, where Governor Abbot sits on the arts commission board.
I’ve also written in past newsletters about the danger of censorship and the more significant threat of self-censorship among arts organizations. We may know about government censorship if there is still a free press that continues to investigate those controversies or brave professional arts associations who publicly protest (where are you, AAMD?). Still, it is the subtle self-censorship that is the real danger. We may not know until much later if our regional theaters (already reeling from the aftereffects of financial losses due to COVID) begin taming down their seasons. And what about exhibits that both celebrate our diversity and, more importantly, illuminate our unconscious bias? It was during the Biden administration (2020) that the National Gallery, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Tate Modern announced a surprise postponement of a sweeping survey of the Canadian-American artist Philip Guston which was set to tour the four museums, presumably until they could better contextualize the exhibition. In the future, those institutions and others may not even contemplate such things in “anticipatory obedience.”
While spending time in Miami Beach this month, I was treated to a mini-festival of the New World Symphony, “Transitions and Trailblazers,” featuring an evening of symphonic music from African American composers, and a cabaret of Hazel Scott’s piano improvisations. Hazel Scott, the highest paid black Hollywood actress in the 30s and 40s, classical pianist and jazz sensation, was forced to move to France in the early fifties after she refused to acquiesce to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and was blacklisted. And just the week before at the NWS, I attended a concert of Jewish classical orchestra composers who fled Nazi Germany to live in Los Angeles in the 30s.
These concerts, and recent events, make the words I wrote before more relevant and worth repeating: “Just as a generation of American Black artists emigrated to France in the 20s because they were unwelcomed, and a generation of Jewish artists left Germany in the 30s, we may find the very core of American creativity departing the US during the next Trump administration.”
