Kennedy Center Honors

The Kennedy Center Honors were on television this week. As many of you undoubtedly know, the Honors have become the highest and greatest reward that performing artists can attain for lifetime achievement. The event itself happens several weeks earlier than the televising and it is about the toughest ticket in Washington. (One has to be careful of hyperbole since the Redskins are returning to glory under Coach Joe Gibbs.) Since tickets ran as high as $6,250 per seat, it mattered not that I wasn’t among the anointed in attendance at the Center.

But the program was not as critically well received as in past years, and Barbara and I sat through the show with less than complete enthusiasm ourselves.

After it was over, I began to dissect the situation to try to find the reason. My conclusion is that the Honors much like many forms of media are not satisfying for a host of reasons. As newspaper readership is dropping and television ratings of news shows are down in favor of the newer vehicle, the internet, so the Honors are suffering a malaise.

One of the problems with newspapers – and cable TV and many other media - is the need to bundle. People have far less time to read morning papers and those who read them dive for their favorite sections, be it news, business, sports, style (culture), whatever. Thus half or more of the paper lies unread. Even we retired folks who devour our papers over multiple cups of coffee ignore many sections. I myself have not read half a dozen stories in the food sections of papers I’ve subscribed to over the course of my life and there are other sections that I only skim.

Newspaper companies assert that they are unable to unbundle the sections and deliver them profitably. Advertisers demand as much coverage as possible, and specialty papers covering only sports, news, etc. just wouldn’t attract the number of subscribers needed to support the venture.

Awards programs have been about specialties, albeit broad ones. The Oscars are for movies, Tony awards are for excellence on Broadway, Country Music Awards are self explanatory, and the list goes on. The Kennedy Center was looking for a niche and it found it in lifetime achievement in the performing arts, and for many years the novelty worked very well. Unfortunately, the niche was built on major league bundling, and that meant that the live audience in the Center and the TV viewers were people with the normal range of likes and dislikes.

In the early years, the unique nature of the awards made putting up with the minor inconvenience of sitting through presentations to artists whom we’d never heard of and arts we didn’t care for just a small price to pay for the larger show. But much as I hate to admit it, I’ve become an elitist who cares greatly for stage and movie actors and many types of classical music performers, but I pick and choose among the more popular forms of entertainment – arts. While I like Willy Nelson, I’m not much of a Tina Turner admirer, even though I find her act occasionally entertaining.

My problem is sitting through a two hour show while being passionately interested in only one, two or, occasionally, three of the honorees. It’s the bundling. Thus, I enjoy the acting, directing and writing portions of the Academy Awards but skip the Country Music Awards. The Kennedy Center however creative and deserving the honorees leaves me with from forty to sixty percent of the program that I could easily skip.

No matter how well they do it and no matter how great the artists, a lot of the audience doesn’t really care about some of the arts and the price in time is becoming noticeable to critics and even the audience.

That’s truly unfortunate as the idea is wonderful.

Blog on!

Wild Bill