Is the Kennedy Center Naming Stunt Gross Negligence?

Nonprofit trusteeship provides lines that can’t be crossed, and they apply to all arts organizations.

I t’s time for September art news. I for one am sick of reading about stunts and lawsuits over whether or not a certain middling, mostly middlebrow music hall in that midsize, widely reviled city — the Swamp — can be called the Trump Kennedy Center. Why in the world is President Trump involved in it? It’s no Palais Garnier. He can’t possibly care to bask in JFK’s afterglow. Camelot’s nearly as old as I am and far more moth-eaten.

I’m a stickler for ethics in museums, so why not in the performing arts? The Kennedy Center is a nonprofit, a messy one since the government owns the building and subsidizes it. Most of the board is appointed by the president, so there’s no trustee recruitment-board committee and trustees aren’t picked on the basis of their capacity and interest. That’s a terrible arrangement and a typical public-private partnership morass, as is the Smithsonian. It’s still a nonprofit. How can a board chaired by President Trump and mostly appointed by President Trump name the building after President Trump? Who’ll sign the naming contract on behalf of the Kennedy Center? Trump will be on both sides of the table. Isn’t this self-dealing?

Are the new members — and the ex-officio members, all pols — embracing a duty of care, making informed, thoughtful decisions, or a duty of prudence, exercising caution? How about a duty of loyalty? A board chairperson threatening to demolish a building unless it’s named for him? That’s a new one in the annals of trusteeship. Part of a Kennedy Center ceiling fell, not all of it, but it left a hole. “How convenient,” I thought, wearing my PR hat. Lawyers for the board say that naming the building after President Trump is necessary to induce him to lead the fundraising for its financial rescue, but that would be a reward for something he hasn’t done yet.

One of my readers told me that Trump’s involvement in the Kennedy Center has to be a prank played on people he despises as much as they despise him. That’s the center’s core audience of government employees, lobbyists, diplomats, pols, camp followers, and their families. If Trump is in a comeuppance mood — and why shouldn’t he be? — I’d suggest he go retrocession and push to send a big chunk of the Kennedy Center’s bourgeois socialist and parasitical audience, found in large numbers in Arlington and Alexandria, back to the District of Columbia, where the Founders put them in what was initially a tilted ten-square-mile box.

Arlington and Alexandria, plantation towns at the time, demanded for decades to be freed from the District to protect their slave-based economy. Congress complied, finally, in 1846. In 2026, Congress can rescind the retrocession. There’s a bill pending in the House to do exactly that. Fight, fight, fight for that to make a real difference, and keep trimming the government’s bloated payroll.

Sweet revenge indeed. Enact retrocession and, poof, 400,000 new Washingtonians will savor the joys of D.C. rule, that holy grail of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and by “joys,” of course, I mean miseries. Call it a reckoning, an atonement, a move for American’s 250th, effective altruism, a flagon of castor oil, or a comeuppance for the ages. It’ll be the mother of all pranks. But, please, let’s not play with a symphony hall, a theater, a place where young and old, rich and poor, go for cultural enrichment.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit are challenging both the renaming and the closing of the Kennedy Center, and they’re weighing whether or not to ask the federal judge on the case to remove the board and place the Center in receivership or, at least, to appoint a monitor. The bar is high. The District of Columbia has an attorney general. Who knew? He enforces fiduciary standards for District charities. The ball might be in his court as well. It’s a distraction and diminishes Trump’s agenda.

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The new White House ballroom and triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery are to be privately funded, but shouldn’t we know by whom? They’ll be public buildings, after all, and this is Quid Pro Quo Land. The Clinton Library, not even a public building, was privately financed, too, and it’s thought that much of the money raised was in the form of backdoor bribes. After thousands of years of human depravity, leave it to the Clintons to find a new MO for theft.

According to President Trump, whom I admire, both the ballroom and the triumphal arch will be War Department assets, with drones flying from them and new laser Pentagon gizmos atop them. Good, in theory. We live in parlous times. Most of us in rural Vermont are armed to the teeth.

But cynical me. It does indeed make these two projects seem more urgent, but how is the fundraising going? If it’s sputtering — together they’re costing, I hear, $650 million — will defense dollars (public money) fill the gap? How much has been raised? The new Obama Library insisted that no federal dollars would be involved, but the project got $135 million in state and local road, sewer, and drainage improvements, with the Feds eventually covering the costs through reimbursements. Channeling my inner Oliver Twist: “Please, sir, I want some more.” Information, that is. Who wouldn’t?

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Once in a while, say, every appearance of Halley’s Comet, I’m wrong. I’ve written a few times about the Elgin Marbles, the Parthenon sculptures displayed at the British Museum since 1817. The Greeks say that Lord Elgin stole them, and they want them back, though Elgin seems to have gotten the okay from Athens’s Ottoman rulers. I thought the British Museum’s trustees would cave. Only the technicalities needed to be massaged, among them British law, which forbids the deaccession of art from national museums without Parliament’s approval. Elites were dying to ease their fake guilt over pretend imperialism. The closest Brits ever came to conquering Greece was Prince Philip’s marriage to Queen Elizabeth II, and he was a German and Dane playing a Greek.

Parliament has priorities, top of which is an Islamophobia mirage. A close second is enjoying a state of salaried paralysis. It’s not helping. The British Museum’s trustees hoped to circumvent the law and lend the Parthenon sculptures to the Greeks long-term, meaning from here to eternity. But Greeks say they will accept nothing short of ownership. The deal is as dead as Patroclus. Good. There’s no evidence the Brits don’t own the Marbles, among the greatest of the museum’s treasures.

The museum staff is ambivalent. The new director doesn’t want his obituary headlined “Returned Priceless Antiquities to Ingrate Greeks to Juice Notting Hill Vanity.” And the curators know that everyone in the third world will say everything in the museum was swiped, and before long the place will echo in emptiness.

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Earlier this week, I wrote about my visit to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, always a joy. I saw good exhibitions, but the big news is the museum’s acquisition of The Portrait of the Count-Duke of Olivares, by Diego Velázquez (1599–1660). Velázquez along with Goya and El Greco are enthroned on Spanish art’s Olympus, but Velázquez is a special case. He was Philip IV’s court painter and also chief curator of the many royal palaces, so he was busy and didn’t paint much — 130 or so pictures. Many are in the Prado, and nearly all the rest are in captivity in other museums.

Olivares was Philip IV’s prime minister for years. His portrait is a head shot with an armored and sashed torso. Velázquez painted it in 1626 as a gift from Philip IV’s court to the Vatican’s ambassador to Spain. It stayed in Italian private collections until last year. The painting’s nice, not great, and Velázquez did magnificent full-length portraits of Olivares. Still, it’s a good thing to have. I don’t know how much the Getty paid. A stiff, drab full-length Velázquez portrait of Philip IV’s first queen, dating to the late 1620s, sold for $35 million in 2024. Since the Getty’s new picture is merely a bust and doesn’t have her big hair and certainly not her fancy farthingale, it probably paid a fraction of this.

In other big acquisition news, Thomas and Daphne Kaplan, owners of the famous Leiden Collection, announced a few days ago that they bought their 18th Rembrandt painting. It’s a boy! Or, more precisely, a saint, that is, Saint John on Patmos, from about 1661. Last seen in 1923, it’s dark and brown, in Rembrandt’s late style. The Kaplans bought it at Sotheby’s last year for $9 million but didn’t spill the beans until now. I admire them. They spot misattributed and long-lost art with a gimlet eye, sometimes taking risks, and are generous lenders.

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Two final pieces of the puzzle that is Ambassador Leah Campos and Kehinde Wiley. She ordered a painting by Wiley removed from the walls of our embassy in the Dominican Republic, for which the painting was commissioned by the Obama State Department in 2013. It’s a big picture of four young artists, two black and two who look mixed-race, and she didn’t like it. “We are turning away from globalist and woke ideologies,” she said in her announcement about sending the painting back to Washington.

I thought playing Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” while the painting was taken off the wall was revelatory. Not gonna take what? Looking at art depicting two black people and two mixed-race people? That’s 85 percent of the Dominican people. That’s 20 percent of Americans. Be careful what you say and be careful what you play. Why should an undiplomatic art critic need to give advice to a diplomat?

I wrote a note to Ambassador Campos asking her to describe to me how the picture expressed “globalist and woke ideologies.” The subjects are students, and they do indeed look ratty, but the theme is kindred spirits, a warm and fuzzy concept espoused by young artists among other tender souls. I heard from Campos. “It is my intention,” the ambassador said, “that everything we project from the U.S. Embassy, including the art and decor, reflect the beauty, strength, and commitment to liberty of the United States of America and its people.” Fair enough. She bailed on explaining “globalist and woke ideologies” and why she’d evoked lesbians — “I saw a huge painting of a picnic in a park with flowers and some lesbians” was her response upon seeing the work, in which women seem to be dancing. Alas, the new art that the Art in Embassies program sent her earlier this year is mostly junk.

Wiley wrote a straightforward, nice letter to President Trump asking to buy the picture back. He’s a good, though not great, artist, and the decent thing would be to sell it back to him for what the State Department paid for it. End of an illuminating story.