Musings under Artistic Censorship
It is no surprise to see free speech under attack by our current authoritarian government. But it is still painful. Recently, Trump’s administration enacted artistic censorship at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and at the Kennedy Center, the closest thing America has to a national theatre.
The NEA provides grants funded to arts organizations to the tune of $200 million a year. Their funding that passes through state and local arts commissions supports theatre in all 50 states. But concerning new requirements for grants have been added, that “the applicant will not operate any programs promoting ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’” and will not “promote gender ideology.”
At the Kennedy Center, Trump replaced much of the board of directors in order to oust the chair and have himself placed in charge, and diverse programming has already been cancelled. And despite the right’s favorite rhyming slogan, facts tell a different story—ticket sales declined by 50% at the Kennedy Center after Trump’s actions. That is a staggering drop. It was a beloved, necessary, vital organization, and now we have to wonder whether it will survive Trump’s destruction.
These blows come at a time when the Arts, both as an endeavor and as an industry, have already been suffering. The pandemic, which continues to this day, closed many institutions and ended many careers. Many institutions rely on government funding and individual giving is generally decreased. We are losing a generation of artists, both to sickness and to our industry’s failure to truly be an inclusive space. For many individuals, much like myself, an arts career has become unsustainable. Under such conditions, this exodus of artists will only continue. The loss is incalculable.
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I’ve seen many social media posts saying something to the effect of “we must still keep making art” despite this government-sanctioned censorship. We need to make art to tell truth to power and we need to make art so they cannot rob us of our joy. And yes, I agree with all that. But we can’t stop simply at these sentiments. For how do we make art when we can’t afford to pay everyone fairly for their labor? How do individual artists or coalitions of artists afford to make the art this current time so desperately needs? Is it resistance if we have to exploit ourselves to do it?
I don’t have an answer. The closest I have is simply that we cannot do it alone. For the arts to survive, we need the help of more than just the artists. We need to audience to demand our existence as well.
I really appreciated this TikTok from Imani At Home giving one concrete example of how people who used to attend the Kennedy Center can refuse to abide by Trump’s censorship but still support the groups they used to see at that location:
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All of this also makes it even more apparent how necessary it is for there to be funding available not just for organizations, but for individual artists. And if what we are truly interested in is art for political resistance, then perhaps it is even more important to fund the work of individuals, whether that’s through independent grants, or through subscribing/donating to them on Patreon, SubStack, YouTube, Venmo, Kofi, etc…
So please, if you love the arts, find a local group, find an individual artist you believe in, and support them.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates opens his latest book, The Message, with a quote from George Orwell:
In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.
Coates’s book of essays is a necessary read, for its moral clarity and clarion call, and for its example of learning in action. The fourth and longest essay has understandably received the most amount of attention as Coates recalls his visit to Palestine and the apartheid he witnessed there. Less has been said about the first three essays which put the fourth in the context of what it means to Coates to be a writer, to be a teacher, and to be a Black man doing these things.
It has been quite a week, a month, a time, to be reading Coates’s essays, and part of what struck me so much was that almost everything he says about writing can be applied to any other art form, and thus, as a theatre artist, I felt much of it deeply.
He notes that for Black writers, “when you live as we have, among a people whose humanity is ever in doubt, even the small and particular—especially the small and particular—becomes political. For you there can be no real distance between writing and politics.”
And indeed, people with marginalized identities of all types will recognize this feeling, the weight of the knowledge that simply to exist, to go about our daily lives, is an act of political resistance.
To create is thus inherently political, no matter what Trump and his supporters wish to claim. To create is to claim and reclaim your humanity.
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Obviously history has shown us the way authoritarians co-op the arts in order to spread propaganda. What also should be obvious is that no theatre company or theatre person of good conscience should agree to the regressiveness of the NEA’s new terms and Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders. But I also can’t help but think of the scene in Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day in which the actress Paulinka speculates on whether she will agree to make films for the Third Reich. That is where we find ourselves.
Timothy Snyder’s first rule for combatting a tyrannical government is “Do not obey in advance.” But many people have not even managed that. One place I work as a contractor has already removed the word “diversity” from its values, claiming as the reason that the word “has very different meanings to different audiences” and they don’t want to be “misunderstood.” But frankly, if this string of executive orders was all it took for you to remove diversity from your list of values, you never actually valued diversity in the first place. Values are meant to be expressions of what is at the core of a person or organization, what is most important. And if you won’t fight for something, it isn’t that important to you. And so I also know, particularly as someone who works in Shakespeare, that secretly, for some arts leaders, Trump’s fascist dictates will come as a relief, because they were only ever paying lip service to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and were annoyed at even having to do that much.
I wish they could move past their own fear around the idea of diversity. It’s absurd because diversity is just simply the world as it is. Vanessa Williams put it succinctly: “Diversity is a fact. Inclusion is a choice.” But we know that what they truly fear is not diversity, but the possibility of losing their own power and position. Though referring to academic spaces, Ta-Nehisi Coates gives an accurate description of these fears, one that applies to these artistic leaders as well: “the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it. That incuriosity is what afflicts the dullest critics of safe spaces and the like. But if these writers, teachers, and administrators could part with the privilege of their own ignorance, they would see that they too need safe spaces—and that, for their own sakes, they have made a safe space of nearly the entire world.”
Diversity is curiosity.
Diversity is a fact.
Diversity is the world as it is.
Thank you for your musings, Charlene!