Which American presidents have most loved the arts?
The 45th would be a nonstarter, Donald J. Trump’s foray into Broadway producing notwithstanding.
(If you’ve not heard, the show was a comedy called “Paris is Out!”; associate producer Trump was 23 at the time, and the production lost its entire investment).
As president, Trump has promoted the eradication of the National Endowment for the Arts and struggled even to find an artist willing to play at his inaugural. In right-wing political circles, the arts have joined Amtrak, the city of Chicago and CNN as frequent Trump punching bags. In Central Park this month, the New York Public Theater has been struggling even to perform “Julius Caesar,” a production unflattering to Trump, without protest and interruption, even though it was written more than 400 years ago.
So not him. How about the 44th?
If you are fan of “Hamilton,” you most certainly would call Barack Obama an arts lover. He introduced Lin-Manuel Miranda on the Tony Awards and both Obama and the first lady were seen, for example, watching Denzel Washington in the Broadway revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.” Obama seemed to take palpable pleasure in the winners of the National Medal of Arts, from Berry Gordy to Mel Brooks to Bill T. Jones. And Obama was a fervent supporter of federal museums, cultural programs and artistic grant-making. On the other hand, some in the arts argued during the Obama administration that he was not inclined to invest large amounts of political capital in the arts. As a leisure activity, he seemed to prefer golf.
His choice, of course.
The presidential name most often allied with support for the arts is that of John F. Kennedy. “The arts incarnate the creativity of a free people,” Kennedy once wrote. “When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art.”
Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, often filled the White House with the fashionable, the creative and the musical. So much so, in fact, that their administration is often popularly described with the moniker “Camelot,” as co-opted from the 1960 Broadway musical, whose lines were quoted by Jacqueline Kennedy after her husband’s assassination in 1963.
But a recent column by the gifted Washington Post music critic Philip Kennicott carried the headline, “John F. Kennedy became a hero to American arts lovers — but he wasn’t one himself.”
Kennicott’s argument, in essence, is that Kennedy’s support for the arts was expedient — a tool for winning the Cold War, cultural division — and, at most, part of his overall admiration for American achievement in any field. Kennicott thus casts the 35th president as more of a college president, a leader who saw his role as rewarding excellence, and decrying mediocrity, in all departments, as distinct from actually enjoying the exhibits or the concerts. That was Jackie’s passion.
It’s a fascinating view, wholly different from the standard mythology about Kennedy and the arts. Kennicott makes a few leaps — he asserts, for example, that Kennedy was not moved by music or opera — that strike me as not wholly knowable, even by a posse of biographers, unless you could see inside Kennedy’s soul. And the act of being moved is not an either-or proposition. Some of us are easily moved; others of us are moved to the extent that we are able. It should be about how far we travel, not the number of visible tears in our eyes.
Kennicott makes the case that Lyndon Johnson actually was the arts-loving president in the modern sense of the word: The notion of excellence in the arts now is spoken of much less than in Kennedy’s era.
In Kennedy’s mind, Kennicott argues, the artist was a solitary figure struggling against the world: an iconoclastic individual suffering through creative agony to achieve elusive excellence. In the face of such artists, all we can do is admire them. Maybe even fear them a little.
We don’t trust or respect those artists as much anymore.
Kennicott rightly notes that we’re now in the thrall of the Johnsonian view of the citizen-artist. We now talk far more of an arts community, or the teaching artist, or artists as agents for social change. Excellence is all well and good, but it is not what matters to us the most these days. And artists who violate the sense of community often find themselves expelled.
Inevitably, I suppose, that change in definition has meant that the arts have taken a political side, since you can’t be an agent for social change if you don’t know what kind of change you want. That side has been chosen, obviously, and it explains why Trump can heap scorn on artists to great political benefit within his own base.
On the other hand, this change is greatly to the better for those in society who need our help the most. In Kennedy’s era, you would not have seen the world-class likes of Yo-Yo Ma playing his cello — in the back of a van — at a St. Sabina peace concert in Chicago early this month. Now you do.
When it comes to politicians, of course, it’s hard to determine true love as distinct from expedience. I’ve served my time watching local politicians at arts events: I always wonder what goes through their heads, how badly they want to get out of there. Or maybe they are relieved to be there. I find the answer elusive.
There is one exception, though, that sticks in my mind: former Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn at any populist entertainment, especially one involving country or rock ‘n’ roll music. Or Dolly Parton.
His eyes glistened. His smile was broad. And he loved every last minute. To borrow Kennicott’s terminology, it was neither Johnsonian nor Kennedyesque. It was just an arts-loving governor, loving a show.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
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