By Joanna Woronkowicz
The explanations for the Kennedy Center’s announced two-year closure have come quickly: declining audiences, soft revenue, and the need for a major renovation to secure the institution’s future. Much of the commentary suggests the Trump administration is masking financial weakness with grand plans. After all, one reliable way to cut operating costs is to stop operating — something many cultural organizations do in less dramatic ways.
But a full two-year closure feels excessive if revenue and attendance are the only issues at stake, especially for an institution that receives substantial federal support. There are many ways to renovate while keeping audiences engaged. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this is not merely an operational decision but a strategic one — though what that strategy is remains unclear. Fifteen years of doing research on cultural infrastructure has offered me as least one possibily: “renovation” has often been used as a means of remaking cultural institutions, and sometimes of turning them into monuments to power.
Still, none of this fully explains the intensity of the public response. People are upset for many reasons. They are worried about artists and staff whose livelihoods are disrupted. They are concerned about the loss of programming in a city that already struggles with arts access. They are skeptical of how public money is being used. And, of course, this decision sits within a broader pattern of the Trump administration’s antagonistic relationship with cultural institutions, expertise, and elites.
But I think there is another reason this announcement has landed with such force: many people feel that something deeper is being cannibalized. Not just a building. Not just a season of performances. But a cultural ethos that the Kennedy Center was believed to stand for – and that some people understood as America’s culture itself.
For decades, the Kennedy Center functioned as a kind of national stage. Its prestige, its proximity to political power, its federal imprimatur, and its programming all contributed to the sense that this was where American culture was presented to itself and to the world. It projected continuity, seriousness, excellence, and a particular vision of cultural value.
That symbolic authority has always rested on explicitly political foundations. In 1994, Congress restructured the Kennedy Center into its current, ostensibly “private” form – one that still receives federal funding, remains subject to federal rules due to its memorial status, and was created by statute in the first place. That same structure preserved the president’s power to appoint and stack the board. The Kennedy Center has always been a political institution; what feels new is not the arrangement itself, but the force with which political power is now being exercised through it.
In that sense, it made a plausible claim to representing “America’s culture,” or at least an official version of it.
But whose culture was that, really?
It’s not a frivolous question, and it’s not a new one. The Kennedy Center’s programming, aesthetics, and institutional norms have long reflected a specific set of cultural assumptions: about taste, about professionalism, about which forms deserve national recognition and which belong elsewhere. For many Americans, that vision resonated. For others, it never did.
There are plenty of people who never saw the Kennedy Center as their cultural home – people for whom it symbolized institutional gatekeeping, coastal elitism, or a narrow definition of artistic legitimacy. It’s not hard to imagine that many in Trump’s political base fall into this category. From that perspective, the idea that the Kennedy Center somehow embodies “America’s culture” may feel presumptuous at best, exclusionary at worst.
This doesn’t mean the Kennedy Center wasn’t important. It was. But importance and representativeness are not the same thing. Over time, we often slide from one into the other without noticing.
Which brings us to the larger question this moment surfaces: when we decide that something must be preserved, whose culture are we actually preserving?
We’ve been wrestling with versions of this question for years. The toppling of monuments, the renaming of buildings, the reassessment of historical narratives – these are not acts of erasure in the abstract. They are conscious decisions about what deserves to endure, what deserves public space, and what stories we tell about ourselves. Preservation is never neutral. It is always an expression of power and priority.
The controversy around the Kennedy Center reminds us that cultural institutions do not just house culture; they define it. They stabilize certain meanings while marginalizing others. And when those meanings are disrupted – whether by political intervention, strategic closure, or symbolic rebranding – the reaction can be fierce, especially among those who assumed that the culture being preserved was universal rather than particular.
“Whose culture is it anyway?” sounds like a joke, a riff on an improv show where the points don’t matter and the story can turn in any direction the performers choose. That’s closer to the truth than we might like to admit. Culture is not a fixed script. It is shaped in real time by those with the power to step onstage, call the scene, and decide which stories get carried forward – and which are quietly dropped. But in moments like this, the points matter a great deal. Because culture is never just about art. It is about belonging, authority, and the stories a nation chooses to tell about itself – and to preserve for the future.