Trump and the Arts, Continued

This week's summary of the damage

As those twin action anti-heroes of the new administration, Mad Musk Furioso and Donald the Destroyer, plunge us into an ever more dystopian hellscape, I’ve been keeping an eye on what the aspiring dictatorship’s slashing and pillaging have meant for the arts. So this week I bring you a brief run-down of what we know so far.

Marina Abramović in “The Artist Is Present”: not that important

But first let’s take a look at the riotously silly news from the venerable publication for which I served as a contributing editor for 25 years (I was “let go,” along with many others, when the magazine changed hands about a decade ago). On March 5, ARTnews posted its list of “The 100 Best Artworks of the 21^st Century.” Take a moment to scroll through these. How many do you know? How many are completely new? I swear, I’ve never heard of at least half of them, and I do try to keep an eye on the bigger art world through a mix of publications, from The Art Newspaper to Hyperallergic. And then ask yourself why some of the giants of contemporary art are not on this list, like Bruce Nauman, James Turrell, Michael Heizer, Cindy Sherman, Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer, Richard Serra, Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and Marina Abramović (whose performance “The Artist Is Present” in 2010 was surely one of the biggest draws at MoMA in the last 25 years). And the list could go on and on. Are they too old? Too dead? Too irrelevant? Or maybe I’m the dodo here.

And now on to the news….

As previously noted, Trump’s crackdown on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion mandates from the Biden era has sent shock waves through the museum world. A few weeks ago, the Art Museum of the Americas, administered by the Organization of American States, abruptly canceled two shows, “Nature’s Wild” and “Before the Americas." Curated by a prominent professor of the arts and environmentalism at the University of Toronto, “Nature’s Wild” was slated to “include works by a dozen artists from across the Americas, many of them LGBTQ+ people of colour,” according to The Guardian. “It was to feature sculpture, photography, video, acrylic paintings, oil paintings and collage including a video installation by the Black artist Lorraine O’Grady, died in December aged 90.”

Alonso Davis’s Suspended Pyramid #4, slated for the “Before the Americas” show

“Before the Americas,” which was scheduled to open on March 21, would have featured works by African American, Afro-Latino and Caribbean artists, “tracing the influence of the transatlantic slave trade and African diaspora,” The Guardian further reported. “Curator Cheryl Edwards…said the only reason given for the cancellation was ‘because it is DEI.’” The curator told The Washington Post: “You can’t tell me that the artists I’ve chosen for this exhibit are not top quality. The whole museum is DEI under that definition.” As of Monday, February 24, the museum listed no upcoming exhibitions in 2025 on its website.

Now comes the conundrum for the museum: How do you curate shows for an institution called Museum of the Americas without including people of color? Maybe they can get Usha Vance to serve on the board. (And should Usha have been granted birthright citizenship? Her parents were both immigrants from India, and she looks awfully brown to me. I question her appointment to the board of the Kennedy Center for the same reasons. Hello? Is anyone in the White House paying attention?)

In other censored shows, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency canceled “more than $180 million worth of contracts at the Department of Health and Human Services, including a $168,000 contract for an exhibition dedicated to the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci,” reported Artnet.

“Fauci was the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, where he served from 1984 to 2022. From January 2020, he was one of the leading members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force under President Trump, which was succeeded by the White House COVID-19 Response Team under Biden, for whom Fauci also served as chief medical advisor.”

I guess because Fauci promoted masks and vaccines, two commonsense health measures at odds with RFK Jr’s belief that killer viruses may be spread by bad diet, he’s simply not worthy of celebration.

On March 3, the Trump administration began making deep cuts to staff at the General Services Administration (GSA), “a government organization responsible for preserving over 26,000 public artworks, including historic pieces dating back to the 1850s.” says another report from Artnet. Again DOGE is brandishing the chainsaw.

“At least five GSA regional offices were closed, and over half of its fine arts and preservation staff were placed on leave, pending termination,” Artnet claims. “The sudden layoff notices left dismissed workers with little time to inform commissioned artists and contractors working on projects.”

Who will oversee the upkeep of Calder’s Flamingo and other important works in the government’s collection?

“The move also threatens federally housed works, such as Alexander Calder’s majestic Flamingo (1974) in Chicago , and Michael Lantz’s Man Controlling Trade (1942) in Washington, D.C.”

The federal art collection under GSA’s management functions as a way to display significant art in courthouses and federal buildings across the U.S.

So now I’m wondering who’s going to take care of Trump’s “Garden of Heroes” when it materializes. That might be a nice job for Barron after he graduates.

This week demolition began on the Washington, DC’s blocks-long Black Lives Matter mural. “The city-sanctioned mural had been created in 2020, after the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for more than nine minutes,” The Atlantic reported. “Floyd’s death catalyzed racial-justice protests nationwide, including in Washington. On June 1, federal authorities used smoke grenades and tear gas to remove protesters from Lafayette Park; President Donald Trump then marched across the park so that he could pose with a Bible in front of a nearby church. Four days later, the area was renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza and the mural was painted.”

Already demolished: the Black Lives Matter mural in D.C.

Many believed it would become a permanent fixture in the district, but the decision to remove the enormous mural near the White House came after U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., introduced an ultimatum: either paint over the slogan or risk losing federal funding. Adds a report from NPR: “The bill also called for the area in downtown D.C. to be re-named from Black Lives Matter Plaza to Liberty Plaza.”

I would like to see the plaza include a new mural, perhaps featuring Musk and Trump, called “White Men Can’t Dance.” Robert Longo would be a good artist for this one. And there would be nothing Woke-y about it.

There have, of course, been tens of thousands of firings since Trump took office, but among the most notable was the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Shelley C. Lowe, a scholar of higher education and the first Native American to lead the agency. Founded in 1965, the NEH has awarded more than $6 billion in grants to museums, historic sites, universities, libraries and other organizations. As Hyperallergic reported, “Among her priorities as NEH chair was helping small and lesser-known organizations, tribal communities, and educational institutions thrive, as she expressed during a roundtable discussion at the Albuquerque Press Club in 2022. ‘My vision is really simple,’ Lowe said. ‘Why don’t we fund these smaller places?’”

Shelley Lowe, former head of the NEH

Though it doesn’t fall under the rubric of the visual arts, and has been covered in numerous publications, Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center in D.C. still remains profoundly shocking. And the most disturbing takedown of its new acting director, Richard Grenell, appeared in Vanity Fair on March 7. (VF’s Nate Freeman has the kind of reporting I don’t see elsewhere on the art world, and you can sign up for his newsletter here.) In the early ‘90s, Grennell was known as a “Republican Party Animal,” working as press secretary for Republican representative Mark Sanford. Later he moved to Los Angeles, hoping to break into Tinseltown as a publicist but ended up flacking for “a decidedly unsexy firm that makes kidney dialysis machines.” He eventually founded his own communications firm, worked for Mitt Romney’s campaign, and took on foreign clients like a Moldovan oligarch and a British company that struck a deal with an Israeli billionaire who controls copper mines in the Congo.

In his missives to staff, he’s referred to as “president, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” When he’s spoken about in meetings, sources said, it is almost always as simply “the ambassador,” a reference to his previous post as chief US diplomat in Berlin during Trump’s first term. Susan E. Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, once said that Grenell is “one of the most nasty, dishonest people I’ve ever encountered.”

Go figger: a photograph by Magnus Hastings, renowned for his drag-queen subjects, is part of Grenell’s private collection

The cultural tastes of the man now sitting atop the most prestigious performing arts center in the nation’s capital include Britney Spears, Elton John, and Lady Gaga. Hanging on the walls of his Palm Springs home is a “print by the artist Magnus Hastings, a photographer who shoots drag queens almost exclusively” (this in spite of Trump’s aversion to drag). So far his biggest contribution to the Kennedy Center’s agenda has been free parking for all employees, but he says he hopes to “make art great again.”

In other news about the Kennedy Center, Lin Manuel Miranda, creator of the blockbuster hit “Hamilton,” canceled plans to show the musical next year as part of the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Lead producer Jeffrey Seller said the “Hamilton” team believed that Trump “took away our national arts center for all of us.”

And last week as veep J.D. Vance and second lady Usha took their seats in the box tier for a performance of the National Symphony Orchestra, “loud boos broke out in the auditorium, lasting roughly 30 seconds, according to audience members and a video posted on social media,” reported The New York Times.

There is always hope.