Culture news, plus an early look at the impressive Obama Presidential Center.

I t’s time for my monthly news piece. It’s not exactly news to say I’ve got misgivings about the strangulation of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) piddles its money, but, taken together, these three spend about a billion dollars. They can do much good if money is targeted at back-of-house arts infrastructure, American art history, and archival preservation and digitization. I was on the IMLS board as a Trump appointee, serving under a Trump-appointed director. Its grants were very sound. The NEH’s were less so over the past few years, but under Bruce Cole’s leadership during the George W. Bush administration, the NEH did fantastic work.

This year’s federal budget is in controlled chaos in Congress now — hence the shutdown — but here’s where we are on arts money. The current version of the House budget cuts these three agencies by about a third while the Senate version maintains funding at current levels. My spies tell me that during this shutdown, the IMLS staff is down to two people. One opens the mail. I think the other bleeds the radiators so the pipes don’t freeze.

There was positive news from NEH on September 15. It awarded $10.4 million, the biggest grant in its 60-year history, to Tikvah, the think tank, to support a multi-prong attack on the recrudescence and normalization of antisemitism, especially in American schools. It’ll develop a curriculum for our middle schools and high schools exploring the Jewish roots of Western civilization. It will also sponsor programs on, among other things, antisemitism and the unique resilience of Jews. I hope it has the same impact as the 1619 Project, except the 1619 Project, sponsored by the Smithsonian and the New York Times, disseminates lies.

Fresh off this triumph, and I assume for unrelated reasons, the president fired nearly all the NEH board last week. The board is left with four members, though the quorum requirement is 14, so it’s a rump board. Britain’s Rump Parliament in 1648 established Cromwell’s Commonwealth and axed the king, but this rump’s sole business is, I hear, vetting proposals for the Garden of Heroes sculpture park, which has no location and, I suspect, few proposals. The NEA’s staff is mostly gone. Where did the NEA, NEH, and IMLS appropriations for FY 2025 go? If Congress eventually keeps the three running with level funding, how will the billion bucks be spent? Will they be slush funds? Where’s the accountability?

Art historian friends insist to me that government provides a third, a half, or, as one man — a very good scholar but otherwise an idiot — told me, “an existential amount” of arts funding nationwide, without which “we’ll live in a world without art.” His tears, heaved in what seemed like gallons, buckled the floorboards. Lucky I wore my wellies.

The NEA, NEH, and IMLS, in that relentless, hard world of math and reality, actually contribute about 1 percent, depending how we count it, of what we Americans spend on the arts, and that’s not counting money spent on for-profit art like Broadway theater and movies. In permitting deductions for charitable giving, Washington provides the arts with an immense influx of donations. Still, a billion dollars for these three agencies can indeed make good things happen if well spent, but without that money, we won’t be back to cave painting. Here, millions of donors support the arts, which is why our culture thrives. So drop the existential twaddle.

Late last month, San Diego’s Prebys Foundation, with $1.1 billion in assets, made emergency grants totaling $13.3 million to arts groups in blissful San Diego County to relieve what they call the “1-2-3 punch of federal and state budget cuts, donor fatigue, and rising inflation.” I love San Diego and would move there in a minute, but my husband, dog, two cats, library, art, and I, an expansive personality, wouldn’t fit in the phone booth space we could afford in La Jolla, and where else would we live but La Jolla?

Prebys is doing what foundations should be doing. It’s filling a local void. It’s a new foundation. I hope it doesn’t fail, captured by left-wing nut jobs. Last month, the foundation gave $500,000 to fund San Diego County’s payments to lawyers springing illegals. It could have been far more had the foundation not chosen to go big on its local arts.

Last week I wrote to Mary Anne Carter, the senior presidential adviser running what’s left of the NEA, and her press person. “What’s happening with the American pavilion at the Biennale in Venice?” I asked. The NEA and the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs oversee it. I also reached out to the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. It’s the mysterious department led by the new Trump-appointed under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, Darren Beattie — yes, I know who he is — and a new staff, together spending $800 million on who-knows-what. The NEA told me to call Beattie’s office. The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs had no comment.

The Venice Biennale opens on May 9. Nearly every other country has already picked its project for the most prestigious art event in the world. Except, well, North Korea, the Taliban, wherever they rule, and isolated island nations known for hunting, gathering, and what we’d call cannibalism. And the U.S. of A. Next year’s our 250th birthday. I have no problem with the Trump edict to dedicate our pavilion to American exceptionalism and to ban race-driven snoozes like the Martin Puryear, Simone Leigh, and Jeffrey Gibson shows in previous Biennales. I will have a big problem if the American pavilion is botched. It would be an epic embarrassment. The State Department, the NEA, and the White House set September 1, very late indeed, to select who’s representing the country. It’s the second week in October. No one has been picked.

Conceiving, organizing, and installing an exhibition in what is now only six months is in the realm of Herculean feats. Though the Guggenheim Foundation and Venice’s Peggy Guggenheim Collection oversee on-site logistics and do this well, the Biennale is an Italian operation, so everything takes more time.

As Eliza Doolittle said, “Move your bloomin’ ass.” Not very Venetian, but you get the point.

The Smithsonian system of museums — 20 of them and a zoo — is using its unspent slush funds from prior budgets to stay open until October 11. After that, will the pandas be forced to forage? The National Gallery of Art shut on Monday. I’ve lived through 13 federal shutdowns, starting with the Carter days, when shutdown was easy compared with gas rationing, double-digit inflation, and malaise misdiagnosed by our short, besweatered twerp of a president. After so many shutdowns over so many years, I’m puzzled, though. Why are we paying federal employees, hundreds of thousands of them, for not working? They’re not exactly what I’d call innocent victims. They hate Trump. And if they went unpaid, there wouldn’t be shutdowns.

The Cooper Hewitt Museum on E. 91st Street in Manhattan, the Smithsonian’s anchor design museum, got ahead of the shutdown-vacay game. It closed in mid-August for three months to install Made in America: The Industrial Photography of Christopher Payne, a show they’ve had years to plan. Three months to install an exhibition? And the entire museum? Even with museum workers riding Coney Island’s Wonder Wheel during staff-appreciation week, and even if they do mandatory Mamdani door-knocking duty while on furlough, three months is a long time to keep the public out. I asked the Cooper Hewitt’s press office what’s taking so long. My curiosity’s piqued and sensibilities galled, since I’ve installed hundreds of exhibitions. I heard the museum is de-installing its Triennial design exhibition, which occupied all floors of the museum, and then installing Payne’s show, which is 70 photographs.

This is bad planning. We don’t close an important museum for three months to switch exhibitions. Aren’t there permanent-collection galleries that can stay open? Shouldn’t we do smaller temporary shows so changes aren’t so intrusive? Rest assured, the Cooper Hewitt’s shop is open Monday through Wednesday so you can buy an Angela Davis T-shirt for Kwanzaa gift giving.

President Trump said last week that a deal between the federal government and Harvard University is “very close” and will involve a $500 million payment by Harvard toward the operation of new trade schools. “They’ll be teaching people how to do AI and lots of other things, engines, lots of things,” he said. Maybe I’ll enroll. Stephen Schwarzman — the Republican billionaire, Harvard alumnus, and Trump friend — is helping to broker a deal. I hope it happens, but it has to be a good deal.

While this is unfolding, the Health and Human Services Department in Washington has started the administrative process required to blacklist Harvard from future federal research grants. I don’t buy Harvard’s claims that it’s saving lives. Maybe, maybe not so much. Grantor — the feds — and grantee — Harvard — have surely grown prosperous, fat, and lazy over the years. Before the spigot’s back on, shouldn’t we know more about patents issued to Harvard, retractions, replication problems, and abuse of overhead money? Goodness, the head of Harvard Medical School’s morgue was convicted just this past May for selling body parts from cadavers left to the school for research.

Before its orgy of antisemitism in the wake of the Hamas massacre on October 7, Harvard was getting about $1 billion a year from the feds, an obese and outrageous amount of money. Civil rights agencies in the Education Department and the Justice Department seem confident that Harvard is still circumventing Supreme Court bans on race-based admissions. Harvard is in hot water for race-based hiring as well.

I’m very skeptical of what I’m hearing. A new trade school system seems amorphous. America already has a robust vocational school system. What makes anyone think Harvard is better at teaching about “engines” than the good old Burlington Technical Center here in Vermont, where my very good car guys were trained? Harvard is also the hubris capital of the Western world. On the one hand, its masters think they can do no wrong. On the other, lots of quiet tweaking of its grossest lawbreaking is happening. Saving face is essential to them.

Alas, the ultra-green, happy-clappy, face-saving choo-choo left Cambridge long ago. We need to see rolling trustee heads, starting with Penny Pritzker, the senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, and going down the line with replacements agreed to as part of a deal. I’ve suggested, to make it easy, that all trustees who worked in the Obama regime should go, but ditching all the lawyers would be fine, too. Harvard has had the worst trustees. I believe in moral hazard.

Speaking of Obama and hubris, I recently visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House on the University of Chicago’s campus. As I drove to the house, the zenith of Wright’s Prairie Style, I saw a massive new building, still a construction site but at its finished height. It’s the new, five-years-late, appallingly over-budget Obama Presidential Center, a complex of buildings on 18 acres in Jackson Park, the Olmsted-designed park and setting for the 1893 Columbian Exposition celebrating, and this is rich, Columbus’s discovery voyages.

What I saw, as architecture, is attractive. The stone is warm and variegated. There will be an 83-foot-tall painted glass window done by Julie Mehretu, who had a retrospective at the Whitney three years ago. There will be lots of other art there. Maya Lin, who designed the Vietnam War Memorial, is doing a fountain in memory of Obama’s mother. There’s also to be a fruit and vegetable garden in memory of Eleanor Roosevelt, not known for agriculture, but at least nothing’s named for Trayvon Martin.

It’s easy to judge the new Obama center by whom it honors — the place is a temple to Obama — and things like its cost and the fact that presidential libraries are more and more imperial. Once the grounds are landscaped and people are there, seeing and using it, it’ll likely be a handsome, popular building.