I am a firm believer in the “sit down and hash it out” school of conflict resolution. That being said, I cannot imagine a pair who would benefit less from this approach than internationally-celebrated composer Philip Glass and Donald Trump.
Watch any interview with Glass and you will find a man circumspect to an almost disabling degree. Look to America and you will see a president who has perhaps never been circumspect about anything in his life. They are, in the overused phrase, divided by a common language.
What, then, to do about the simmering row between president Trump and the performing arts (excuse the phrase) “community”?
Shortly after his inauguration, the US president invited himself to be the chair of the supposedly bipartisan Kennedy Centre in Washington, DC. He dispatched the director, and most of the board. And late last year the name Donald J Trump was slapped on to the front of the building above “The John F Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts”. Ticket sales have tanked, patrons have protested, artists have departed, cancelled or played to half-empty rooms.
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And then on Tuesday, Glass – armed with name recognition his fellow protesters may have lacked – escalated things. “Symphony No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the Symphony,” Glass wrote in a letter to the centre, which was shared with CNN. “Therefore, I feel an obligation to withdraw this Symphony premiere from the Kennedy Center under its current leadership.”
Pity Trump! Now he’s in a bind – he is not going to take his name down off the centre mere months after putting it up. Tail-between-legs concessions are not his style. But could you imagine putting yourself in charge of something, only for it to become totally impotent? Like mounting a hostile takeover of your book club, only for everyone else to inevitably quit.
Trump loves the performing arts – with an evident fondness for Memories from Cats. The dissonant, repetitive, cerebral compositions of Glass might not be exactly to Trump’s tastes. But this kind of rejection has got to hurt.
Like Trump and Glass, politics and art do not speak the same language. The US president can strong-arm his way through global conflict – bringing a coterie of supine European leaders to the Oval Office to all but kiss his ring. He can force Nato leader Mark Rutte into behaving like a simp, and then expose him for his sycophancy after the fact. And he can get what he wants by that sheer economic heft – his tariff programme is unsubtle, rather un-Republican and terribly effective, so far.
He can wield none of that power over Glass – a mere composer, sure, but one immune to the lingua franca of geopolitics in 2026. He is not going to save Nato but Glass has a privilege that Emmanuel Macron doesn’t have – to exist outside the realm of military and financial threat.
[ Was anyone surprised when Trump called a woman journalist ‘piggy’?Opens in new window ]
Trump, first rejected by the musical establishment, and now unable to exert any kind of control over them? I don’t know him personally but I think that probably stings more than some bellicose posturing from the prime minister of Canada at Davos. People don’t tend to put their name on centres they don’t care about.
Sledgehammers – as the West’s centrist establishment is learning a touch too late – are effective in politics. (Carney was not the first to realise this, but perhaps the first to make the case so full-throatedly from the top.) They are nearly always ruinous in art: think of the key change in Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer; or the in-your-faceness of Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen; I might add “anything by Goya” here too. Successful art trades in ambiguity, solipsism, subtlety and all those other cliches. And so, the machinery of the artist is just different from the machinery of the strongman. They are fated to talk past each other for eternity.
This, incidentally, is why art is mostly a bad vehicle for political commentary: it is either too shy to challenge orthodoxy properly (Banksy’s worldview is fairly commonplace) or it habitually states the frickin’ obvious (everyone say “thank you Sally Rooney” for teaching us about capitalism).
Art does best when it ignores the prevailing political winds – and lucky for the artists, the prevailing political winds affect them so much less than the poor statesmen that walk among us. In this Might is Right world, I would rather be Philip Glass than Mark Carney.
And so, “politics is downstream of culture” might be the most-often-repeated and least correct of adages. Politics and culture exist in parallel worlds with different motivations, and they sometimes interact. Usually unsuccessfully, mind you. And so this is the one universe where Trump can’t get his way. You brought a sledgehammer to a book club? What on earth are you planning to do with it?
