On March 27, President Trump signed "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," a directive mandating that the Smithsonian Institution and the Department of the Interior, which oversees national monuments, memorials and statues, rectify "divisive narratives that distort our shared history." This is just one of several actions aimed at changing how arts and humanities organizations tell the story of the country's past and present. For instance, the majority of staff at the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment for the Humanities has been put on leave or terminated, and Trump installed himself as the Kennedy Center's chair of the board of trustees and announced plans to shake up the prominent arts organization.
This reframing of the nation's history has been welcomed by Trump's supporters but has prompted concern from organizations like the American Historical Association and high-profile artist cancellations at the Kennedy Center. Given the outcry, UC Berkeley News asked experts from various campus departments to reflect on why politicians might have a vested interest in influencing such cultural institutions and what the impact of these changes might be.
Shannon Jackson, chair of the History of Art Department and one of the principal investigators on a Mellon Foundation grant about arts censorship, on government influence on cultural institutions:
There are many reasons why the arts and culture, like education, have become targets. The cultural sector serves many functions for a democratic society: The arts can offer spaces of community connection and healing, and they can also offer spaces of critical reflection and speculative imagination. Precisely because so-called "soft power" is real power, autocratic leaders want to keep "culture" in check. Under the guise of efficiency, authoritarian governments eliminate some wings of their national cultural apparatus and appropriate others for their own ends.
In many countries around the world, nations support a robust cultural sector that is accessible to all. That support does not mean limiting and censoring the ideas that come out of it. Democratic countries do not censor and redirect "culture" so that it can become a marketing campaign for a national administration; that is what autocratic countries do. That is certainly what fascist countries do, as the historical lessons around "degenerate" art in Nazi Germany should teach us.
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