The takeover of the Kennedy Center, Washington’s largest performing-arts venue, by President Trump and his supporters has provoked a predictable outcry from people against whom Trump campaigned. The place where over-educated elites and denizens of the deep state go for opera, ballet, symphony concerts and DEI-indoctrination productions was an easy and obvious target.
Is the takeover a herald of populist cultural counter-revolution, or a bright shiny object dangled to distract the media and the chattering classes? Pretty clearly the latter, and its shine is dimming quickly. Alongside agency shutdowns, mass firings, radical policy shifts, data harvesting by 20-somethings – a red alert a day, it seems – the future of the Kennedy Center is a marginal concern.
Despite its more diverse programming in recent years, the center has always been a mostly mainstream, mostly highbrow venue. It will continue to be, however many bookings of country music or patriotic pageants are added to its schedule. Its house highbrows will accept constraints on their programming; the National Symphony Orchestra already has canceled a gay pride show.
The president, elected chairman by the center’s new board, and its interim administrative chief, Richard Grenell, who is also presidential envoy for special missions, presumably will have more on their minds than what is or isn’t staged at the facility.
They may leave that to the likes of Paolo Zampolli. Profiled recently by Politico’s Michael Schaffer, Zampolli runs a New York agency for fashion models and “is credited with introducing [Trump] to his future wife, Melania, at New York’s Kit Kat Club.” His “Manhattanite idea of glitz likely tracks pretty closely with that of the president,” Schaffer writes. Appointed by Trump to the center’s board in 2020, Zampolli envisions glamorizing the place, with a marina for boaters, a high-dollar restaurant and events such as fashion shows. “So luxurious. So prestigious,” he says:
http://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/21/paolo-zampolli-kennedy-center-plans-00205280
Meanwhile, the avant-garde and “woke” productions that the center strikes from its schedule should have no trouble finding alternative performance spaces. The Washington area has plenty that aren’t affiliated with the federal government and are insulated from political pressure. One venue has already stepped up: Strathmore, the performing-arts center in DC’s Maryland suburbs, will stage the International Pride Orchestra’s Pride Celebration Concert on June 5, after the Kennedy Center canceled the event.