Does good art need to be popular art to be worthwhile art?
Vincent van Gogh’s sole sold painting suggests not. Emily Dickinson published fewer than a dozen poems while she was alive. Franz Schubert’s short life was far more defined by the crush of poverty than the embrace of success.
And what do we mean by popular? Verdi declared “La Traviata” a failure after its first performance in 1853. Bizet’s “Carmen” got raked in the reviews when it premiered in 1875. Puccini had to stuff “Madama Butterfly” back into its chrysalis like five times before the thing was ready.
The greats tend to be greatest in retrospect. Even Beethoven flopped now and then. At its 1808 premiere, his Fifth Symphony survived a rough performance and a chilly reception (both senses, it was freezing in the hall).
I’m thinking about this because earlier this month, Kennedy Center president Richard Grenell sat for a televised interview with PBS NewsHour’s Amna Nawaz that proved unintentionally revealing.
Their chat turned feisty fast. It began with a question about the recent string of artist cancellations at the Center, but was swiftly rerouted by Grenell into a critique of media outlets, including The Washington Post and PBS, for their alleged misunderstanding of the art center’s finances. At one point, he suggested Nawaz’s questions were tailored to accommodate the PBS studio namesake and erstwhile Kennedy Center chairman David Rubenstein.
Grenell defended the center by touting President Trump’s fundraising prowess, which he says brought it a fresh $130 million. He also downplayed cancellations by artists “scheduled by the previous regime, who had a different criteria.”
“My criteria, President Trump’s criteria, is different,” Grenell said. “We cannot have arts institutions that lose money because you have programming that is woke or not popular. We need popular programming to sustain arts institutions.”
There’s a strange assertion tucked into Grenell’s claim that the Kennedy Center “cannot have unpopular programming that doesn’t pay the bills,” given that he also notes, quite correctly, that “no art institution is able to pay for programming with ticket sales alone.”
So is it popularity that pays the bills or not?
Things clarify a few seconds later: “You need to have donors in corporate America who come forward and say, we like this programming, we want to write a big check, and we want to support it.”
Put aside that nonprofits like the Kennedy Center do not operate with the same rules or market-driven motivations as Broadway and Hollywood. And put aside that nonprofits exist precisely to insulate certain entities — charitable, educational, religious, artistic — from the performance demands of the commercial sector.
What appears to be at issue isn’t whether past programming at the Center was too “woke” for the general public — who, at one time, eagerly filled the ticket-buying half of the fiduciary equation. Rather, the question is whether programming is too woke for (double-checks notes) unspecified corporate donors.
We don’t know which (if any) sought-after corporate donors deemed past Kennedy Center programming too radical for association, but even still, this strikes me as a strange posture for any arts administrator to take toward the arts. We need corporations to fund the arts, sure. But we also need them to … like them? Since when? And what does that mean?
Who is Bristol Myers Squibb’s favorite playwright? Is Raytheon also an international film buff? Who’s on Spotify’s Spotify? What are we talking about when we talk about corporate America liking something?
As grateful as I am that corporate funding of the arts continues to be a thing, I, for one, could not give a bright pink blinking hoot if General Dynamics actually enjoys the operas it sponsors.
And why would I? The whole gist of large corporate sponsorships of the fine arts is that massive conglomerates get to pantomime personhood in public by vaguely championing the importance of the arts to our shared sense of humanity. In return, what corporations enjoy is a combination of brand enhancement, prestige by proximity and sometimes even tax perks. Nobody cares if the mezzo gave Chevron chills.
Or at least, we shouldn’t. The notion that unstated corporate aesthetic preferences should determine what the public encounters as art — indeed, what counts as art at the nation’s art center — is absurd. It’s why we don’t (yet) have touring musicals about a young couple discovering the bold, zesty flavor of Cool Ranch Doritos.
And while the Kennedy Center has never been the bleeding edge of the avant-garde, it certainly has dovetailed its presentation of the nation’s most established artists with important experiments by rising talents.
Take “The Cartography Project,” a commissioning initiative launched in 2022 by former social impact director Marc Bamuthi Joseph that was dashed by his ouster last year. The project supported the composition of “new chamber and vocal works by creators of color from grieving communities across the nation, foregrounding the phenomenon of race-based violence in the United States.”
Somehow, this didn’t scare off Amazon or Microsoft, both sponsors of the 2022 premiere.
“Beyond memorializing the trauma of death, we seek to honor the enduring occasion of a dignified life,” Joseph wrote in notes introducing the Project. It makes no mention of breaking even.
Initiatives like this, and other programming now likewise decried as “woke” by the very center that presented it, were never conceived to make money or turn a profit, but rather to fulfill the institution’s stated mission of ensuring educational and outreach programs that “meet the highest level of excellence and reflect the cultural diversity of the United States.” Whatever these anti-woke declarations are intended to mean, in reality they impede the center’s ability to fulfill its core responsibilities to its once overlapping audiences.
When the NSO opened the spring half of its season this past weekend at the Kennedy Center with Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” it wasn’t because the thing was a smash hit. At its 1913 premiere, police had to drag 40 people out of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées during intermission. Brawling audience members pulled each other’s hats down, brandished hat pins, scheduled duels. You could say it was unpopular.
And I could spend the rest of my days drafting a list of not particularly notable classical concerts, chamber recitals and operas that never even came close to selling out — all of which were worth performing, each of which deserved to be heard, none of which suffered for a second from its lack of popularity with conglomerates.
People who love the arts pay for the privilege to exchange our experience for somebody else’s for an hour or two or three; and we do it for the thrill one feels when those experiences resolve into one image, one line, one chord. Corporations pay for the privilege to be in the room.
Why? Because shared experience is as human as it gets. Few things are of greater value. That’s why the arts are worth supporting; especially the stuff that doesn’t translate into a buck.
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