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Column: The Art Lovers Trash Trump from Ballrooms to Museums
The silliest Trump scandal imaginable is the forthcoming White House ballroom, funded entirely by private donations. If everything is a scandal, is nothing a scandal? Anything that feeds President Trump’s ego must be denounced no matter how much it serves a larger public purpose.
Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott uncorked a typical piece of anti-Trump agita on October 24, headlined: “Why the demolition of the East Wing is so shocking: The speed of destruction, and the projection of power, are part of the strongman playbook.”
Journalists find fascist parallels in seemingly everything Trump touches. Kennicott wrote that images of leaders looking over architectural plans is a trope of “political iconography” by elected leaders. But he found an echo in an expert: “Columbia University professor Barry Bergdoll pointed out in a speech at the National Building Museum on Wednesday, the public display of the architectural model has a darker history in fascist and totalitarian politics, as well.”
The funniest part was Kennicott insisting this needed an elaborate review process “balancing opposing worldviews, forging compromise, incorporating a wide range of perspectives and insight.” Most journalists at the Post would set their desks on fire if you proposed this balance of opposing views in their overwrought Trump critiques.
Nobody should go to Kennicott for balance, or for reverence. Last year, he trashed the AP photograph that showed Trump after he was shot in the ear, raising a defiant fist. He wrote: “It will encourage some of the darkest forces in American civic life. People who preach violence, who revel in its political potential, can now say that one of their own is a victim, and he was. From that, more cycles of violence are almost inevitable.”
On the other hand, Kennicott gushed in 2017 that the oddball official portraits selected by the Obamas – where Barack looked like he was emerging out of a bush, and Michelle was colored gray, like a corpse -- were “great,” in part because that couple is awesome. “Now that they have left office, now that their fundamental decency is in high relief by contrast with the new political order, memory is refreshed.”
This is the same critic who wrote a piece for July 3, 2021 headlined “Maybe it’s time to admit that the Statue of Liberty has never quite measured up.” The statue, he claimed, is “ambiguous and ambivalent. As familiar to some Americans as the flag, the statue is just as meaningless or foreign to others, a sign without significance, or worse, a symbol of hypocrisy or unfulfilled promises” -- because Trump ruined America’s promise, with the “past four years of strident and often violent anti-immigrant sentiment."
On October 26, Kennicott was back with an overly long attack on how “Trump attempts to consolidate power over cultural infrastructure,” a campaign against taxpayer-funded museums, “to capture or coerce them into new narratives of patriotism and American exceptionalism.” Unsurprisingly, he championed painter Amy Sherald – of “gray Michelle” fame – who pulled her work from the National Portrait Gallery over her painting “Trans Forming Liberty,” suggesting the Statue of Liberty as a drag queen.
This article’s logic collapsed when Kennicott lamented that Trump and his backers “gin up anger and online mobs.” That’s not healthy. Guess which angry mob is healthy? Leftists who vandalize art to protest Big Oil, because “museums, at their best, are institutions that respond to public needs and concerns.”
Kennicott railed against “the usual horsemen of the authoritarian apocalypse: suspicion, cynicism and apathy.” But what the Left really can’t stand is anyone challenging their ideological stranglehold, anyone making a “culture war” to erode their overweening cultural dominance.
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