“Art Is The Great Democrat”: Kennedy Center Saga Recasts Two Americas

By Daniel Okafor

President John F. Kennedy raised $30 million for what is now the Kennedy Center. President Donald J. Trump has threatened to shut it down and demolish it. That contrast anchors “Art Is The Great Democrat,” a new essay by Shiriel King Abramson published amid the center's naming dispute and the shockwaves of the midterm elections.

Abramson frames the standoff as a collision between two visions of America: Kennedy's, in which the populace creates the country it wants, and Trump's, in which perils are “solvable by one powerful man.” She quotes Trump's 2016 declaration, “I, alone, can fix it,” against Kennedy's famous inaugural inversion — “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

What did Kennedy actually believe about art?

The essay's title comes from a lesser-known Kennedy line. “Art is the great democrat,” Kennedy wrote, “calling forth creative genius from every sector of society, disregarding race or religion or wealth or color.” He saw art as both a product of democracy and a contributor to its flourishing.

The institutional history is concrete. The center began as the National Cultural Center, created by bipartisan legislation signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis fundraised $30 million in 1962. After his death in 1964, the center was designated a “living memorial” to the president.

Kennedy's campaign-trail thinking survives in a 1960 reply to Theodate Johnson, publisher of Musical America. “There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts,” he wrote. “The age of Pericles was also the age of Phidias. The age of Lorenzo de Medici was also the age of Leonardo da Vinci. The age of Elizabeth was also the age of Shakespeare. And the New Frontier for which I campaign in public life can also be a New Frontier for American art.”

Where does Trump fit in?

Abramson is unimpressed by the counter-legacy. She points to the failed “beautification” of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, now, she argues, a symbol of reckless public spending. Trump joked about renaming the pool after himself in a speech the night before the midterms. It would be funny, she writes, if it signaled self-awareness rather than refusal to acknowledge costs.

His 2018 “very stable genius” tweet supplies context. His threats against the Kennedy Center, she argues, reveal how threatened he feels by a vibrant cultural sector — an institution that has hosted the nation's premier music, theater and dance companies.

What is the center actually programming?

While Trump narrows the national imagination, Abramson writes, the Kennedy Center broadens it. Its digital stage reaches viewers priced out of expensive tickets. Next up: a PBS series showcasing diverse performing arts cultures, featuring Gaby Moreno, the Guatemalan singer-songwriter and guitarist who moved to Los Angeles at the turn of the century.

Moreno's 2011 song “Ay Que Emigra” recounts leaving home to immigrate far away: “Vengo desde muy lejos / Buscando el azul del cielo / Siguiendo predicamentos / Vengo desde muy lejos.” Abramson notes that “predicamentos” can mean either “prestige” or “predicament” — prescient, she says, given ICE's yearslong campaign of terror and Trump's first-term rage at Guatemalan president Jimmy Morales for refusing a deportation agreement. Where Trump expels immigrants, the center platforms their stories.

Does art about others risk cliché?

Abramson concedes the risk. The Colombian film Un Poeta, released last year and directed by Simón Mesa Soto, satirizes exactly this: a poet asks a poor young girl to write about her disadvantaged circumstances, and once-beautiful poetry becomes trauma porn. Good art needs both mirrors and windows, she writes — stories reflecting our own lives and stories opening onto others', a point she supports with philosopher Martha Nussbaum's Cultivating Humanity: art lets us see others “not as forbiddingly alien and other, but as sharing many problems and possibilities with us.”

What can art actually do for democracy?

Not win legal battles, Abramson admits. The tripartite government has only partially checked “the whims of a wannabe tyrant,” and the free press has failed to stop state-sponsored fictions. But art can inspire civic engagement and broaden the moral imagination.

She cites Storyworks, a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces documentary theater spotlighting “the human costs of injustice and structural inequality to help drive social change,” staged in the Bay Area and nationwide. Her prescription for readers is modest: attend a performance, share a poem at an open mic. Answer Kennedy's call, she writes, “and, in doing so, discover a more beautiful democracy.”