KenCen as Tip of the Spear, Part II

The Trump administration’s blitzkrieg assaults on the Kennedy Center and on DEI policies have captured the public imagination. But as Philip Kennicott explains in the Washington Post, these brash moves may represent only the opening salvos in an attempt to disrupt the nation’s cultural infrastructure.

“Nothing has shocked the arts and culture world quite as profoundly since the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s,” he argues, pointing to the federal government’s “potentially enormous powers of coercion… from the tax code to visas for artists to novel interpretations of antidiscrimination laws.”

The growing fear among many is that the capture of the Kennedy Center and rejection of DEI represent just the tip of the spear in what may become an all-out attack on the nonprofit world with, in Kennicott’s formulation, “the aim of crippling or silencing groups that have traditionally been independent of government coercion.”

While the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities have been perennial political punching bags, they have proven resilient. The greater threat is that less visible government activities could be changed to the detriment of nonprofits. Without the federal government’s Arts and Artifacts Indemnity program, for instance, the cost of borrowing priceless works of art for blockbuster exhibitions would prove too great for museums to bear.

The process of acquiring a visa to enter the U.S. to perform, already unwieldy and at times capricious, could be made much more difficult to navigate. It isn’t hard to imagine a system that excludes any artist who is perceived as a critic of the current administration or a threat to some ginned-up moral code. Manipulating the visa-granting process would discourage artists from coming as well as encourage skittish presenters to avoid booking anyone controversial.

Tax code

Every element of the nonprofit world, which is hardly monolithic, is subject to the tax code. Of particular importance to art museums is the tax deductibility of the full market value of a work of art. Absent that, donors have fewer incentives to donate works that otherwise could be sold.

The tax code could also be manipulated to remove an institution’s nonprofit status. Every few years the museum world is alarmed by some legislator’s suggestion to begin taxing institutions’ property or endowments, or make them pay sales tax. While these attempts have thus far failed to gain traction, the current political climate is sure to revive such suggestions.

It can be tempting to see an emerging conspiracy to bend the arts and cultural sector to Trump’s purposes, but that may give too much credit to a leader for whom chaos is mother’s milk. Nevertheless, the nonprofit world must develop a coherent, strategic response. The culture wars of the 1980s and ‘90s, ancient history to many of today’s leadership cohort, were opportunistic “brush fires,” writes Kennicott. “If the current administration succeeds in chilling any discussion of equity in the public square,” he continues, “the impact will be systemic and catastrophic.”

To be prepared, he concludes, “Cultural groups… [must] make hard decisions about their basic values.”

Washington Post