US President Donald Trump’s name was added to the Kennedy Center on Friday in Washington, D.C., unveiling new signage that read The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.The board unanimously voted to replace the name of The Kennedy Centre to The Trump Kennedy Centre.
The Kennedy Centre: Three Presidents who shaped
President Dwight D. Eisenhower
The national cultural centre was first proposed in 1955 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who sought to create an “artistic mecca” in Washington, D.C., and formed a commission to establish what was then called the National Cultural Center, NPR news reported.
Three years later Congress passed an act to build the venue with the purpose of presenting classical and contemporary music, opera, drama, dance and poetry from the United States and around the world. The act also mandated that the centre offer public programmes, including educational offerings and those for children and older adults.
President Kennedy
During the Kennedy administration, a November 1962 fundraiser featured stars such as conductor Leonard Bernstein, comedian Danny Kaye, poet Robert Frost, singers Marian Anderson and Harry Belafonte, ballerina Maria Tallchief, pianist Van Cliburn and a seven-year-old cellist named Yo-Yo Ma and his sister, 11-year-old pianist Yeou-Cheng Ma. In his introduction, Bernstein celebrated them as immigrants and hailed them as the latest in a long line of “foreign artists and scientists and thinkers who have come not only to visit us, but often to join us as Americans, to become citizens of what to some has historically been the land of opportunity and to others, the land of freedom.”At that event, President Kennedy said: “As a great democratic society, we have a special responsibility to the arts — for art is the great democrat, calling forth creative genius from every sector of society, disregarding race or religion or wealth or colour. The mere accumulation of wealth and power is available to the dictator and the democrat alike; what freedom alone can bring is the liberation of the human mind and spirit which finds its greatest flowering in the free society.”Congress designated the centre a “living memorial” to President Kennedy after his assassination, and the venue opened in 1971.
President Lyndon B Johnson
President Lyndon B Johnson turned the centre into a focus of his Great Society agenda. Philip Kennicott, the Pulitzer Prize-winning art and architecture critic for The Washington Post, said: “Johnson in the Great Society basically compares the arts to other fundamental needs. He says something like, ‘It shouldn’t be the case that Americans live so far from the hospital. They can’t get the health care they need. And it should be the same way for the arts.’ Kennedy creates the intellectual fervour and idea of the arts as essential to American culture. Johnson then makes it much more about a kind of popular access and participation at all levels.”Kennicott added that the space has always balanced its role as a palace of the arts with popular accessibility. “It’s also open. You can go there without a ticket. You can wander in and hear a free concert. And they have always worked very hard at the Kennedy Center to be sure that there’s a reason for people to think of it as belonging to them collectively, even if they’re not an operagoer or a symphony ticket subscriber.”Kennicott predicted that the controversy over the new name would fade within a few years, comparing it to the 1998 renaming of Washington National Airport to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. “A lot of people said, ‘I will never call it the Reagan National Airport.’ And there are still people who will only call it National Airport. But pretty much now, decades later, it is Reagan Airport,” he said. “People don’t remember the argument. They don’t remember the controversy. They don’t remember the things they didn’t like about Reagan, necessarily. … All it takes is about a half a generation for a name to become part of our unthinking, unconscious vocabulary of place. And then the work is done.”Some Senate Democrats have launched an investigation into the leadership of the Kennedy Center amid allegations of cronyism and corruption. Go to Source
