At the Center for Performing Arts in Washington D.C., Donald Trump fired the art workers on staff and rightly so. They are guilty of ordering short on art and culture in the golden age of one-way causation, and for programming a drag show. Now Chair of the corporate subsidy, formerly the Kennedy Center, there will be tax breaks. This is a small price to pay for the priceless: art, says Trump. Only other people’s money can buy that. Those dedicated to maintaining a strict consensus of virtue can regulate this on their own time. For everyone else, Godot Arrives!
Trump himself has blown up the foundations of what his own appearance successfully, crucially distorts. Or maybe, now that the Nation’s Arch-Fiend has been vanquished, the felt loss of a heritage that should accompany the independent national development of the United States, is a music we can’t hear. In the 1970’s, the language of state action presented the Third World to be domesticated: the rules of the international order became a site of exposure with extra-national force assuming the internalized sovereignty of a state. When foreign policy is a domestic product and it sucks as much as the canned laughter, what is a work of art? Bruce Andrews: “It is as if a strategic logic of policy — an apparently literal denotation of international rules and needs — looms so large in the foreground that only the government’s intention remains in view, not its underlying motivation.”
Silicon Valley wants a government that is good and that is also efficient and that is also cheap. I thank the Trump administration, and Melania Trump most of all, for restoring not only truth and sanity to American art, but for imbuing art history with a sense of power and evil that I find irresistible. This newsletter will be my baddest investment yet.