The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is closing, at least for now. Its Trump-appointed board voted for a temporary shutdown days after a federal judge blocked it from putting Donald Trump's name on the building's facade, and Barbra Streisand, made a Kennedy Center honoree in 2008, has called the whole fight galling and painful to witness.
The board's stated reason is money. It says the centre is heading for bankruptcy and will not have the funds to pay its staff. Running alongside that, Trump had threatened to cancel a planned $257 million renovation if his name did not go on the building, which makes the financial argument harder to read at face value.
Streisand set out her case on her own website. The honour, she wrote, "represented a belief in the importance of art to the life of a democracy," and she listed the actors, musicians, singers and dancers who have worked on those stages as the reason the place matters. Her objection is to a revered institution becoming the subject of a struggle over one man's name.
Her account of the sequence is blunt. After a judge ordered the name removed, she wrote, a humiliated Trump had a large tarp put over the facade, where it remains, and a thoroughly defeated Trump then announced a closure that the board describes as a major renovation. She quoted John F. Kennedy's own view that a society loses its vitality when the creative impulse cannot flourish freely, and closed by telling Americans to vote in the midterm elections.
The legal side is not finished either. On Thursday a federal judge ordered the board to give 30 days' notice before making any major physical change to the building, a ruling aimed squarely at Trump's threats to tear the centre down if his name does not appear on its main structure.
What nobody has published is the part that affects anyone holding a ticket. There is no closure date, no length, and no statement about what happens to performances already booked into the building. We have tracked this one for months, through the board's vote to shut the doors for two years, the administration's demolition warning and the reported $100 million in revenue the name change cost the venue.
The facts
- The Kennedy Center's Trump-appointed board voted to close the building temporarily.
- The vote followed a federal judge blocking Trump's name from the facade.
- The board says the centre is heading for bankruptcy and cannot pay staff.
- Trump threatened to cancel a planned $257 million renovation over the name.
- Barbra Streisand, a 2008 honoree, criticised the closure on her website.
- A federal judge has ordered 30 days' notice before any major physical change.
- No closure date or plan for booked performances has been published.
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