Last week, the Kennedy Center Honors, an annual gala that purports to celebrate “significant contributions to American culture through the performing arts,” announced its 2014 honorees: the singers Al Green and Sting, the actor Tom Hanks, the ballerina Patricia McBride, and the comedian Lily Tomlin. As in previous years, the selection demonstrates the degree to which the awards have diverged from their original mission—to pay tribute to luminaries of theatre, dance, classical music, and show business—and instead become one more temple of celebrity culture, magnifying the fame of already familiar faces. Of the five honorees, McBride is the only one whose career has unfolded on the kinds of stages that are included in the Kennedy Center complex. This ratio is now the norm at the Honors: in 2007, the pianist Leon Fleisher found himself in the company of Steve Martin, Diana Ross, Martin Scorsese, and Brian Wilson; in 2012, the ballerina Natalia Makarova mixed with Buddy Guy, Dustin Hoffman, David Letterman, and Led Zeppelin. Perhaps the Kennedy Center will eventually drop the awkward interlopers and devote the evening entirely to Hollywood actors, pop stars, and talk-show hosts, in a grand synthesis of the Oscars, the Emmys, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In this week’s magazine, I write about the sacralization of pop culture, the power of the celebrity colossus; the Kennedy Center Honors have become a case in point.
They began promisingly enough, in 1978, seven years after the Kennedy Center opened. The inaugural choices were Marian Anderson, Fred Astaire, George Balanchine, Richard Rodgers, and Arthur Rubinstein. In that brilliant constellation, Astaire had the glamorous Hollywood profile, but he also happened to be one of the supreme dancers of the twentieth century. In the early years, bona-fide stars on the order of Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, and Frank Sinatra were outnumbered by the likes of Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Martha Graham, Leontyne Price, and Tennessee Williams. Roger Stevens, Jr., the founding chairman of the Kennedy Center, expressed hope that the Honors would “help build more enthusiasm for the performing arts,” and it seemed that he had found a canny strategy for doing so; the big shots drew a spotlight toward artists like Rudolf Serkin or Merce Cunningham, who had no profile on the talk-show circuit. In addition, the mad jumble of names captured the disorderly energy of the American arts.
Soon enough, though, the balance began to shift toward the celebrity elect. Choices became more head-scratching: Perry Como? Charlton Heston? Oprah Winfrey, with her occasional film roles? CBS televised the ceremony from the outset, as it still does, and inanity set in. “It takes ingenuity to make the Kennedy Center Honors more mortifying with each passing year,” Frank Rich wrote in the Times in 1995, observing that Georg Solti and Stephen Sondheim had been “serenaded by a band playing what sounded like a Tijuana Brass rendition of ‘America’ from ‘West Side Story’—in blissful ignorance of the facts that Mr. Solti conducted Beethoven and Mahler for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, not show tunes for the Boston Pops, and that Mr. Sondheim wrote the lyrics of ‘America,’ not the music.” For some years, the venerable stage genres clung to two places in the annual pantheon, but in the past decade they have been reduced to one. You may find a classical musician or a dancer, but not both.
This is not to suggest that recent Kennedy Center honorees are undeserving of praise, to one degree or another. Al Green and Lily Tomlin are bracing, slightly unexpected choices—less eye-roll-inducing, certainly, than last year’s embrace of Billy Joel. As for the picks of previous years, I’d be the last to contest the historical magnitude of Led Zeppelin or Bob Dylan. But they hardly lack for laurels. Why should they add to their shelf a prize that could have gone to a comparatively unsung figure such as Meredith Monk, who, as singer, dancer, composer, director, and filmmaker, is as close to a complete performing artist as American culture offers? The logic that has taken hold of the Honors is one of pop triumphalism: it’s not enough for pop culture to dominate the mainstream; it must colonize the spaces occupied by older genres and effectively drive them from the field. Thus you have operas based on Hollywood movies, musicals based on pop albums, Broadway plays starring teen idols who may or may not be audible from the back row. The genuflection toward pop culture assumes a grovelling aspect. The winner takes all; to those with much, more will be given.
The Kennedy Center Honors may not be a lost cause. At the beginning of the month, Deborah Rutter, the former president of the Chicago Symphony, took over as the head of the Kennedy Center, replacing Michael Kaiser, whose artistic vision lacked urgency. Rutter, as Anne Midgette reports in the Washington Post, is a serious, able, ambitious administrator, who might be able to restore some rigor to the Honors. But the selection process is notoriously murky, as a 2010 Times piece suggests, and there will be cries of “Élitism!” if more playwrights, composers, choreographers, and jazz musicians appear in the annual roll—notwithstanding the fact that, as A. O. Scott pointed out in the Times a few years ago, the country’s economic élites tend to back the most popular fare. The current arrangement of the Honors has an obvious rationale: celebrities bring in higher ratings and wider press coverage. The devolution of the awards into one more star-studded red-carpet extravaganza may have been unavoidable, particularly given that interminable red carpets are part of the Kennedy Center’s interior design.
Still, one can fantasize about a ceremony that would exalt performing artists regardless of Q rating and box-office appeal—particularly those of more traditional cast, the ones who can throw their voices to the back of a theatre or paint forms with their bodies. Let’s recall that the man for whom the Kennedy Center stands as a national “living memorial” made a point of inviting Balanchine and Pablo Casals to the White House, even if he preferred the company of the Rat Pack. Jacqueline Kennedy privately expressed disgust at the fact that the government spent billions on defense and almost nothing on culture. “The arts had been treated as a stepchild in the United States,” she later said. “President Kennedy and I shared the conviction that the artist should be honored by society.” What remains of that conviction in Washington, D.C.?
