Like any building from 1971 or democracy created in 1776, the Kennedy Center needs some TLC and possibly some structural repairs. But I was vice president at that arts center in Washington, and I can tell you that maintenance was almost certainly not the reason it closed its doors last month.
It is officially closed because part of the Grand Foyer ceiling collapsed in a storm, the plaster collapsed onto the floor, and the building had to be closed for safety reasons. The Justice Department itself argued in court filings that there was no real emergency warranting the closure. Meanwhile, the board approved a quarter-billion-dollar renovation plan drawn up without competitive bidding; Meanwhile, the president is openly considering demolishing the building entirely if his name is not mentioned. This administration is effectively destroying the infrastructure of the arts in order to eliminate the infrastructure of the imagination.
Now I’m watching all of this from the outside. When the new “leadership” took over last year, my team and I were among the first to be let go. My department studied free public programming, creative equity, cross-sector community development, and measuring the social impact of the arts. The fact that we were among the first out the door probably tells you everything you need to know about who was appointed to run this place.
As an American, an artist, and a former member of the workforce, I understand that the Kennedy Center is more than a building. This is a living monument to a president taken from us too soon, a man who had the audacity to aim for the moon to get us there before the advent of science. To honor such visionaries, this country built a center for the creative impossible and named it after him.
And true to that name, my mission at the Kennedy Center was to explore the relationship between the economics of art and the economics of civic desire. As a team, we believed that inspiration erodes apathy and creates empathy. The building is a container for federal infrastructure, but the art that fills the Kennedy Center makes the case that inspiration itself is part of the infrastructure of our democracy. “What are the necessary conditions for dreaming together in public?” An art center is being built to ask the question.
If not artists, who are the authors of the public imagination? When a baby is born or your daughter gets married, do you recite a statute, quote a poem, or dedicate a song to commemorate the event? Who can illuminate the path to the post-horror economy if not artists?
So why occupy an arts centre? What can be gained by closing down a national bastion for the sake of creative excellence? How perverse for a president whose policies underfund education and the arts to destroy a site of national curiosity and then demand that his name be written on the shell of what exists. This president used executive orders to intimidate artists. banned writers and journalists, art education sabotagedcreated oppressive red lines within the National Endowment for the Arts and Threatened charitable organizations that fund arts and cultureThen he turns around and wants his name to be in our national cultural center.
The Kennedy Center wasn’t perfect when I worked there. There are no institutions. But the business was viable, the staff was competent and reliable, and the work we did together often touched something close to the sublime. Our job, like that of many arts workers across the country, was to mobilize creative magic in the service of social harmony and prosperity.
That’s what gets lost in the noise of storms, lawsuits and renovation budgets: Fun is everywhere, but inspiration is rare. Sometimes you’re sitting in a dark movie theater with strangers and the right note is played and you hear it with your ears but feel it somewhere else entirely. In the intestines and heart. And the stranger next to you feels it at the same time. You can practically feel the room change. All this magic can happen in one theater, and the Kennedy Center has nine of them. If a solar panel uses the sun’s energy to power a building, an intentionally operated theater can use the energy of its inspiring audiences to power a city.
Art preserves memory. It also holds the horizon and the feeling of what a country could still be. The patriotism brought to life by the creative community takes the American experiment seriously enough to question, examine, remember what we have forgotten, and mobilize the collective American dream. That’s the name of the Kennedy Center: A president who dreamed of a country that wasn’t afraid of beauty, that wasn’t afraid of elegance.
Fortunately, America’s creative workforce tirelessly orchestrates this sense of creative provocation and patriotic inquiry. It is alive everywhere, including the work of individual artists like Carrie Mae Weems or the work of collectives. For Freedoms and their “America, Beautiful” attempt.
We, the chronically depressed citizens of the United States, cannot afford anything less than one pillar of creativity. We must fight to restructure all arts institutions for an inspiring future.
Spoken word artist and actor Marc Bamuthi Joseph was vice president for social impact at the Kennedy Center.