wesa.fm/inbox-edition: In the past week, the upheaval in Washington, D.C., has included Elon Muskâs DOGE team getting possibly illegal access to sensitive U.S Treasury records and the Trump administration slashing funding for the National Institutes of Health.
But the havoc has been systemic. In the arts, Trump drew attention by apparently firing every member of the board of the prestigious John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts he didnât appoint and installing a loyalist as executive director.
3 comments:
New grant requirements to be in compliance with all executive orders in order to receive funding for the arts is an incredibly high bar to maintain and set for arts groups to comply with and seemingly only serves to be a workaround for the current administration to leverage control over arts groups and they kind of art they create. While not an overt attack on the creation of art itself in these organizations, it definitively acts as an additional constraint that will hurt theaters and other arts organizations alike as budgets may decrease in size. Further, it may even have the intended consequence of changing the kind of art that theater put on stage so that they can still receive the funding they need (moreso in the case of smaller theaters that have less financial freedom), which will likely cause interesting trends over the next few years. As we carry forward, we ought to have even further scrutiny into the actions of theaters and whether or not they attempt to carry the principles of the current administration forward through the art they create.
Like Josh said, itâs such a high bar for organizations to maintain. How can a company or organization be expected to root out something that is so core to who they are as a group? Like this article said, many of these organizations and companies consider DEI to be central to their identity. Furthermore, restriction of expression in the arts has got to be either unconstitutional or just plain morally wrong. Either way, it is a sign of worse to come. The arts should be able to speak freely about the social. Economic, and political climate of their nation and of the worlds. Once that censorship begins, people begin to question what they can say, what theyâre allowed to say, etc. So many people follow trump, and now that heâs started targeting DEI, that is going to become a hot button issue for years and years now in future elections, I bet. People are going to be upset at DEI, whereas I guarantee that a few years ago, they didnât even know what DEI was. Either that or they were so uneducated as to believe DEI was just hiring unqualified black and gay people for fun. It goes to show that people are always going to twist and turn stories to fit whatever their fucked up narrative about the world is. I hope that these executive orders arenât going to do much permanent damage. However even after trump is no longer president, he will continue to be on the board at the Kennedy center for example. Part of me feels we will never be rid of him until he is dead. That should become a national holiday.
The shifting rules from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) are definitely making waves, and honestly, itâs a little wild to think about how many smaller arts groups might get pushed aside because of the new funding restrictions. Take Genesis Collective and PearlArts Movement and Sound, for exampleâtwo arts organizations that rely on these grants, but now theyâre in this weird limbo. Itâs like a twist in a drama where the main characters are trying to stick to their values, but the external pressures keep changing the rules of the game.The whole Challenge America program cut feels like a plot twist straight out of a dystopian play. Youâve got these community-focused projects that are now at risk, just because of bureaucratic changes. It reminds me of the way art is sometimes marginalized in the grand scheme of thingsâlike in theater, where certain plays or performances get attention only if they fit a particular narrative or agenda. But what really hit me was how these changes tie into the bigger conversations weâve been having about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in all creative fields. It's like when a powerful character in a play suddenly flips the script, and everything the ensemble believes in gets challenged.
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