And the top five executives apparently were making a total of $2.5 billion a year. The head executive is apparently himself making just over a million per year. And according to Grinnell, the Kennedy Center has completely run out of money. Despite the fact that they’ve gotten, I think, about $250 million over the course of the last five years. Apparently, they’re completely in debt. So anyway, Rick Grinnell has taken over the Kennedy Center. He’s fired these executives. And he has installed a ban on all left-wing activities, like drag shows, for example, that apparently they were conducting at the Kennedy Center.

Now, obviously, the arts and croissants crowd in our nation is howling to deafening rates. The fat lady is singing, as it were, and they are claiming that they’re going to protest the Kennedy Center. They’re not going to work there. They’re not going to perform there. They’re not going to patronage there or anything akin to that. And I saw, actually, a lot of anger among my old Peabody crowd. Many of you know my first degree was in classical guitar. I went to a music conservatory, Peabody Conservatory, in Baltimore. And I love my years there. And I love the arts, obviously.

But I see that a number of my longtime friends there are up in arms. They’re so upset over this. They’re basically calling it a fascist takeover. Of course, this is what Hitler did. He took over the arts, blah, blah, blah. What’s so sad about all of this is that I don’t think they recognize how inevitable this ultimately was, given how the arts have changed over the last 150 years. So I’m sure you all know, especially if you go to Europe and you visit some of the, like, Florence and Rome and the like, or Athens or even, you know, some of the, oh, beautiful monuments of Byzantium and Moscow and so forth, you know that the arts have always been very conservative.

The arts were, for thousands of years, dedicated to the awakening of beauty, just kind of like this music that we’re hearing, right? And beauty, we have to understand, in the classical imagination, was an objective value. Beauty wasn’t, you know, in the eye of the beholder. Beauty was actually a physics. Beauty was related to this notion of attraction and pull. So that’s why we find, whenever we find something beautiful, we associate it with a literal physical attraction. We’re drawn to it. So the beautiful was the allure, the loveliness, the delightfulness, the delectableness of the true and the good.

And so beauty was an objective value that the artist was tasked, literally commissioned, with the sacred job of awakening. And so what you have in the classical world is this notion that beauty is something that serves as a kind of bridge between the human person and the eternally divine, the eternally true good and beautiful. And so the artist, the literature, art, architecture, music and poetry and the like, served as the bridge between the individual person and the divine world around us. And it fulfilled that bridge by communicating beauty to us through literature, art, architecture, music and poetry and drama and the like.

And then in the process, it awakened our senses. It redeemed our senses. And because in pretty much the whole of the classical tradition, the senses were fallen. They fell right along with the soul, you know, in the biblical narrative, the fall in Genesis chapter three. It’s not just the soul that fell. It’s the senses that fell as well. And so our senses need to be reawakened. They need to be redeemed. And in the Christian tradition, this is an anticipation of foretaste of the resurrection of our bodies on the final day. So art was extremely sacred. It’s always been very sacred, but all that changed in the 19th century.

I don’t know if you know this, but it was actually Beethoven who was the first to emancipate art from the church and from the courts up until Beethoven’s time in the mid 19th century. Artists were employed either as court composers or as church musicians. Beethoven was the first one to be able to sort of go out on his own. And he tapped into a growing number of benefactors that came from what’s called the nouveau reach. There was a whole new wave of wealth that flooded Europe at the time. And so these benefactors ended up becoming the new patrons for the arts.

It’s exactly what happened here in the States where your Vanderbilt’s and your Rockefeller’s and your Peabody’s ended up establishing foundations for the arts that they funded. They started building concert halls, music conservatories. And then in the mid 20th century, our tax dollars ended up getting sent to these foundations. All fine and dandy, but what ended up happening is a new definition of artistic freedom started to emerge. What we have to stand again in the classical world is freedom has two sides to it. There’s a freedom from and a freedom for. And a freedom from, of course, is negative freedom.

Don’t tell me what to do kind of freedom. Don’t tread on me kind of freedom. Very important part of freedom in terms of protecting us from any sense of coercion or compulsion. But there’s also a positive side to freedom, and that’s the freedom for. The freedom to do what we ought to do, and that’s what true beauty is supposed to awaken within us. If we are truly attracted to that which is good and true, that frees us, that awakens us to experience our ultimate human flourishing. Well, with this new sort of patronage system of both benefactor and taxpayer, artistic freedom became entirely negative.

And now you were considered to be truly artistic if you didn’t celebrate the truth of good and beautiful, but actually you spit on it. Art became very provocative. Art became very angry. It became very deprecating to all that is conservative and traditional and religious. And so that’s how you got in mid 20th century some of the strangest, most ridiculous art imaginable. For example, in music you have something called Four Minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds by John Cage. And it involves a musician coming out on stage, sitting at the piano, and then just staring at the piano doing nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds.

By the way, if you’re interested, it’s also been transcribed for orchestra as well. It’s a great version. So what this new conception of freedom ultimately ended up doing, ironically, is destroying music. It’s silenced music. It destroyed art. It silenced art. You saw the recent art exhibit with a banana taped to a wall. I mean, these are just absurd. But again, it’s considered to be artistic freedom. Here’s the problem. What happens when you kind of sold your soul as an artist to the benefactor and the taxpayer and then the taxpayer decides they don’t like this kind of art anymore.

The taxpayer actually wants to preserve culture. They want to protect tradition. They want to return to the celebration of religious pursuits. Now what? Now what do you do? You see, this is what I mean. They kind of set themselves up. My fellow artists who are still trying to make a living at it, they set themselves up in such a way that what happened this past week with the Trump takeover of the Kennedy Center was inevitable. By the way, if you hear that, there’s roosters everywhere in Key West. It’s hilarious. But it was absolutely inevitable. There was no way around us.

If you have emancipated yourself from the church, from the courts, as it were, and now you are totally reliant on taxpayers, what happens when the taxpayers become conservatives? What happens when the taxpayers want to protect culture rather than mock it and ridicule it the way you’ve been doing? Well, you get exactly what you got this past week. And so unfortunately for left-wing artists, this 150-year experiment looks like it’s coming to an end. It’s interesting because it’s happening in Hungary as well. Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, he’s taken over the arts. And interestingly enough, Hungary spends more on the arts per capita than any other nation in Europe.

They spend about 3.5% of their budget on the arts, whereas the average, as I understand it, on the continent is about 1%. So this was inevitable. Eventually, conservative forces were going to retake the arts. And I think that’s exactly what has started to happen with the takeover of the Kennedy Center. God bless, gang. I’ll see you in the studio on Monday. Take care. [tr:trw].

See more of Dr. Steve Turley on their Public Channel and the MPN Dr. Steve Turley channel.