His Royal Majesty seeks to emulate JFK’s power over American art. But bending culture to his will might not be as easy as he thinks.By Gal Beckerman
By anointing himself chairman of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Napoleon-style, His Royal Majesty revealed a longing to seize one of America’s most romantic and abiding myths: Camelot. Nothing would be better than to appropriate the elegant and sparkling aura of cultural influence that came to characterize John F. Kennedy’s administration—hopeful, attractive, even sexy. And if the liberal elites refuse to see His Royal Majesty this way, his actions seem to be saying, then he’ll just have to create his own version, MAGAlot.
His Royal Majesty’s interests seem to flicker depending on the day—yesterday owning Gaza, today invading Canada—but when it comes to culture, he is all in. This is not a job to outsource to Elon Musk. He is most engaged when issuing executive orders calling for “beautiful” and “classical” architecture in federal buildings or reviving his idea for a National Garden of American Heroes (where the stony likenesses of Humphrey Bogart, Kobe Bryant, Antonin Scalia, and Shirley Temple will congregate for all eternity), and especially when promising to turn his showman’s instincts toward transforming the Kennedy Center—to “make art great again,” as the newly appointed interim president of the center put it.
