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      Long-Lost Klimt Portrays African Prince

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      A rediscovered painting of an African prince by Gustav Klimt that captured visitors’ attention at the TEFAF Maastricht fair in the Netherlands is under negotiation for sale, the Vienna-based gallery offering the work said as the event closed on Thursday evening.The early, almost photorealistic head-and-shoulders portrait of Prince William Nii Nortey Dowuona, shown against a floral background, had been on display at the booth of Wienerroither and Kohlbacher, priced at 15 million euros, or about $16.4 million.“We are in active negotiations with a major museum,” said Lui Wienerroither, the gallery’s co-founder, though he declined to name the institution. Unlike at contemporary art fairs, high-value sales at TEFAF Maastricht, which specializes in older art, are often finalized after the event to allow buyers time to investigate questions of provenance or attribution. “Processes of due diligence have to be followed,” Wienerroither said.The man depicted in this 26 inch-high painting was a member of a group of Africans from the Gold Coast (a former British colony now known as Ghana) who were live exhibits in colonial “human zoos” that toured Europe at the end of the 19th century. In the summer of 1896, they were put on display in a mock-African village in Vienna’s Zoological Garden, where Klimt might have seen them. The highly popular show, which attracted 5,000-6,000 visitors a day, was vividly evoked by the contemporary Austrian writer Peter Altenberg in his novel, “Ashantee.”Wienerroither and Kohlbacher says Klimt’s painting came to light in 2023 when an Austrian couple brought the unsigned work, crudely framed and in a grimy condition at the time, into the gallery. The dealers say they discovered a barely legible Gustav Klimt estate stamp on the back of the canvas and confirmed with Alfred Weidinger, the author of a definitive catalog of Klimt’s works, that Klimt was known to have painted a portrait of a prince of the Osu people in what is now Ghana, though the painting’s whereabouts had been unknown for many years.Subsequent research revealed that the painting was still in Klimt’s possession when he died in 1918 and was sold by auction from his estate in 1923. Five years later, it was listed among the works in a Klimt memorial exhibition in Vienna, on loan from a local collector, Ernestine Klein.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Art Basel Hong Kong’s Film Section Features Work by 30 Filmmakers

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      This year, the fair features the work of more than 30 filmmakers. The centerpiece is “Vampires in Space,” a mix of sci-fi and social commentary.The phrase “attention economy” has gained currency in an ever more distracted world.An art fair like Art Basel Hong Kong next week offers thousands of ways to spend attention, usually in short bursts as visitors make the rounds and land their eyes on a work of interest briefly, over and over.The film section at the fair requires slowing down, given that the medium is, in art world parlance, time-based, a term used for any work that has duration as a dimension.Art Basel — established in 1970 in Switzerland — first offered a film section in 1999 when the organization had just one fair.Hong Kong has had a film section since its second edition, in 2014. In the past decade, more than 300 films have been shown there, including those by well-known makers such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lou Ye, Cheng Ran, Lu Yang, Marina Abramovic, John Akomfrah, William Kentridge and Takashi Murakami.“The film sector is very well received in our Hong Kong show,” said Angelle Siyang-Le, the fair’s director. “The younger generation responds to the material well, and they’re more open to the moving image.”Most screenings take place in an auditorium inside the fair’s venue, the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center, that has around 100 seats, and the program usually draws a “full house,” Siyang-Le said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Flannery O’Connor’s Artworks Finally See the Light

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      “I don’t know how to write,” Mary Flannery O’Connor once said. “But I can draw.”She had just become a cartoonist for her high school newspaper, at Peabody High School in Milledgeville, Ga. There, and later at Georgia State College for Women, she hoped to place her linoleum-block-print satires of campus life in The New Yorker.Instead, she left for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Yaddo residency in New York State, shed “Mary” from her name and published two finely tuned novels about religious belief, the perversely funny “Wise Blood” (1952) and her grave “The Violent Bear it Away” (1960), then a collection of short stories, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1955), whose staring contest with belief and tradition in the modernizing South placed her at the front of new regional literature until her death from lupus in 1964, at age 39.A framed photograph of the interior of the Andalusia farmhouse in Milledgeville, Ga., where O’Connor made paintings that decorated the walls during her lifetime.The Andalusia farmhouse today is a museum devoted to O’Connor’s life. The exhibition of her paintings is at an interpretive center on the premises.Since the republication of those newspaper cartoons, in 2012 — and a deeply researched biography in 2009 — an academic scavenger hunt for the true Flannery O’Connor has taken off. Her prayer journal and unfinished third novel were recently published, a documentary and biopic released. On March 25, for the centenary of her birth, her alma mater, now the Georgia College & State University, will exhibit 70 newly acquired artworks of a different sort, which some O’Connor scholars have heard about but far fewer have seen. Then on March 27, the exhibition moves to the Andalusia Interpretive Center, an exhibition space nearby run by the college.Comprising painted woodcut caricatures from her childhood along with regional oil paintings from the peak of her writing career, the artworks might shed new light on a literary vision cut far too short, a Roman Catholic theology that scholars have debated for 70 years and infamously protective gatekeepers — her mother and cousin — who may have resisted access to O’Connor’s artwork.On a balmy afternoon during Lent, Seth Walker, the college’s vice president of advancement, led me up two flights of stairs of a peeling Federal-style foursquare house in downtown Milledgeville, where O’Connor, age 13 and a self-described “pigeon-toed” only child “with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex,” moved from Savannah with her parents, and where she would reside until age 20.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Frick Collection is Reopening. Here’s a Sneak Peek.

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      Holland Cotter is the co-chief art critic and a senior writer for the Culture section of The Times, where he has been on staff since 1998.Produced by Maridelis Morales Rosado and Josephine Sedgwick. Design and development by Leo Dominguez and Gabriel Gianordoli. Images: The Frick Collection (All Artworks); The Frick Collection/Frick Art Research Library Archives (Adelaide H. C. Frick); The Frick Collection Archives (Helen Clay Frick) More

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      in US Politics

      Creating art under Trump will become harder but it will remain vital | Seph Rodney

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      One of the most pernicious effects of a bully’s intimidation is making victims afraid of being true to themselves, because it’s the essential and authentic parts of them that incite the bully’s contempt.During his first week in office Donald Trump issued a blitzkrieg of executive orders. Among them, Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity and Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.” According to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, among the things these orders direct the administration’s agencies and staff to do are:
      Terminate diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, positions, and programs in the federal government; terminate equity-related grants and contracts; and repeal prior executive orders designed to ensure equal opportunity in the workplace, including a decades-old executive order from the Johnson Administration … ”
      In the art scene these moratoriums had almost immediate consequence. Cheryl Edwards, a visual artist and curator based in Washington DC, had been working on an exhibition titled Before the Americas which was to be mounted at the Art Museum of the Americas, a cultural venue managed by the Organization of American States (OAS), an organization established in 1948 that includes all 35 independent nations of the western hemisphere. In 2021 Edwards was approached by the current museum director, Adriana Ospina, and the previous director, Pablo Zúñiga, to, in her words, curate an exhibition to include African American artists in the DC area. They agreed on a framework engaging the question “Because we are people in a society that existed before slavery, how does that manifest itself in the work of artists in this area and the work of artists in their collection?” She was given a budget of $20,000 (with a $5,000 curator’s fee), the money being allocated by the previous US ambassador to the OAS under Joe Biden, Francisco O Mora. Edwards’s show was scheduled to open on 21 March, but she was informed by Ospina on 6 February that her show was “terminated”. Edwards attests this happened “because it is DEI”.Similarly, Andil Gosine, a Canadian artist and curator, who is also a professor of environmental arts and justice at York University in Toronto, invested several years into an exhibition at the same museum. His show, titled Nature’s Wild with Andil Gosine, was essentially a collaborative project with 50 artists, writers and technicians exploring the themes he had examined in his book of the same title. It was to include artwork by a dozen artists from across the Americas, many of them LGBTQ+ people of color. He received a phone call from Ospina on 5 February informing him that the show had been canceled, despite none of the funding for it coming from OAS (that came from Canada Council). For him that that was “heartbreaking news”. He says: “This is the most time, money and heart I’ve put into anything. This was going to be the pinnacle of my last 15 years of work in the arts.”View image in fullscreenWith his background in international relations (working at the World Bank after graduate school) Gosine understood that the museum’s response had to do with fear of losing their budget by showcasing queer artists in the wake of yet another executive order, this one promising a process of “Reviewing United States Support to all International Organizations”. He explains: “This is a content question, a gamble on how to deal with a shifting political tide: to conform enough, sacrifice some people, sacrifice your values to survive, and then maybe not get the budget.” According to the Congressional Research Service, in 2023 OAS had a budget of $145.2m, with the US contributing 57% of that. Having the United States rescind their support would clearly lacerate the organization’s operations. Nevertheless, Gosine thinks that their anticipatory acquiescence may be for nought. He asks how an organization that is fundamentally concerned with human rights and social justice can reinvent itself enough to mollify this vengeful and disdainful regime.The cancelation of art exhibitions negatively impacts the lives of curators, but these executive orders have an even more corrosive effect on the lives of artists – particularly those whose immigration status is in flux. Erika Hirugami, a formerly undocumented Mexican-Japanese immigrant, doctoral candidate at UCLA, and Los Angeles-based curator who has been working in the arts for 10 years, told me that the pressures placed on immigrants impel them to erase themselves, anticipating law enforcement officials incarcerating and deporting them. She attests that she knows more than 80 artists who “are terrified because having an exhibition at a museum that says that this artist is undocumented signals a reality that generates a kind of violence”.To better understand this, it helps to think of the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who extensively studied European art museum visitors in the 1960s, concerned with why most art museum visitor profiles seemed to be correlated with a certain socio-economic class. What he found was that given the proliferation of middle-class aesthetics throughout the museum, the majority of working-class people self-selected to not attend, feeling that the museum was not the place for them. He called this de facto rejection of the poor and working class “symbolic violence”, meaning a non-physical violence expressed through the imposition of social norms by a group with greater social power. Worse still, these norms are internalized by all social groups who come to believe that social hierarchy and inequality are natural and inevitable.View image in fullscreenHirugami explains that for artists who are undocumented, this administration has sought to normalize living in fear. Practically this means that some artists now forgo being paid for their work for fear of having their means of remuneration traced. Thus, their labor goes unrecognized and unpaid. To protect themselves some artists, according to Hirugami, go “zero social”, making themselves digitally invisible by taking down their websites and social media pages.Arleene Correa Valencia, a formerly undocumented artist living in Napa, California, understands this dread. “There’s no handbook to how to lose that fear,” she says. Valencia was an enrollee in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program, and a college student during the previous Trump administration, when she was under almost constant threat of losing her scholarship and means of staying in the country legally. Even now, having achieved permanent resident status, she still worries. “I still feel like I’m very much a target, especially having come to my residency as a Dreamer. There is this feeling that I did it the wrong way.”Less than two months after taking charge of the federal government, Trump and his agents have devised ways to not only erase certain artists and certain types of art; but also to compel these artists to erase themselves, in the name of self-protection. This is exactly the opposite of their most essential work: to engage the public to experience their work and to move them toward transformation. What is a possible solution? Valencia turns toward her art. She says:
      My practice has changed in that now I’m more grounded in knowing that my people have this beautiful language of painting. And with that I also, tattooed my head to recognize, my Indigenous background and my connection to Mexico. This is the time where we have to make our markings known, not just on our bodies, but in our work, marks that are true to ourselves.”
      Indeed, it’s crucial to refuse the option of doing violence to oneself by denying those very aspects of the self targeted in the culture war being waged by this administration. To maintain who you are can be its own kind of victory. More

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      Inside the Former ‘Underworld’ Where Ai Weiwei Makes Art

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      Ahead of his largest-ever exhibition in the U.S., the dissident artist reflects on collecting jade and living below ground.For part of the year, the artist and activist Ai Weiwei works in a cavernous 30,000-square-foot studio on the underground levels of a former 19th-century brewery in Berlin. Its triple-height vaulted cellars, which Ai, a self-taught architect, renovated himself after leaving his native China in 2015, are now pristine and well-lit, but when he first visited the long-abandoned subterranean space, it was “completely dark,” he says, “like an underworld.” In that way, it recalls the underground home where the artist lived for five years as a child, a place he calls “the black hole”: a bare shelter on the edge of the Gurbantünggüt Desert in the remote Xinjiang region, one of the sites where Ai’s father, the renowned poet Ai Qing, was exiled following China’s Anti-Rightist Campaign in the late 1950s. In that half-buried home, Ai first encountered the authoritarianism and censorship that he has now spent four decades resisting, ridiculing and at times enduring again, as a defender of human rights and self-proclaimed political “troublemaker.” Today, he travels frequently, stopping in Berlin; Cambridge, England, where his sixteen-year-old son, Lao, his only child, attends school; and Montemor-o-Novo, a town in the countryside of southern Portugal whose sunny climate reminds him of his childhood in the desert. That approximately 20-acre property hosts a few assistants, as well as many cats, dogs, birds and fish and a reconstruction of his wooden Shanghai studio that was demolished by local authorities in 2011. Ai is used to constant movement, and to the possibility of displacement. “The concept of a home has never been truly established for me,” he says.Ai was first drawn to this once-derelict space as a creative challenge. “I’m more interested in problem-solving than in getting a beautiful studio,” he says.Kathrin TschirnerA detail of a work for an upcoming public installation in New York.Kathrin TschirnerOn a recent visit to his Berlin studio, I followed Ai, 67, down a narrow staircase into an austere, windowless alcove. Its concrete floor was scattered with twisted steel rods from the installation work “Rebar,” which Ai made in China between 2008 and 2012, sourcing the metal from school buildings flattened by the devastating Sichuan earthquake. “Rebar” and similar works made in response to the earthquake critique the government’s corrupt construction regulations and lack of transparency in the tragedy’s aftermath. This is one of the projects that, in addition to his prolific online writings, helped turn Ai into one of the most famous dissident artists of the past few decades. The resulting surveillance and a government-ordered detention eventually drove him to leave Beijing for Berlin, a city he says appealed to him for its mix of “ruin” and “new life.” In Ai’s archival room, a large world map that helped him plan his documentary on refugees, “Human Flow” (2017), leaned against a wall beside an overgrown fiddle-leaf fig tree. On display elsewhere were dozens of antique Qing dynasty wooden chairs, from the participatory project “Fairytale” (2007), for which Ai conveyed 1,001 volunteers from China to the Documenta art exhibition in Kassel, Germany.Life jackets left behind by refugees who arrived by boat in Lesbos, Greece, in 2016. Nearly a decade ago, Ai affixed thousands of the jackets to the facade of Berlin’s Konzerthaus as a humanitarian call to action.Kathrin TschirnerDetail of an in-progress installation.Kathrin TschirnerAccumulation — the head-spinning accrual of hundreds, thousands or millions of identical objects — is fundamental to Ai’s interventions, which often comment on both collective action and consumer culture. Sometimes he finds items that speak directly to a predetermined theme or event, as with his headline-making installation of discarded refugee life jackets affixed to the facade of Berlin’s Konzerthaus in 2016. But if he finds the right object, he may conceive of a whole project around it. Ai began collecting flea-market antiquities in the mid-1990s, when he lived in China, and now acquaintances and strangers alike frequently tip him off about underappreciated goods that are available in astronomical quantities. One such message is how he came into possession of 30 tons of clothing buttons from a defunct British factory. (“‘No’ is not in my vocabulary,” he says.) After years spent classifying the buttons into 9,000 different categories, his team has begun sewing them into new, textile-based works. Some of these are currently on display at Lisson Gallery in London, which had canceled his 2023 show after the artist’s public comments about the Israel-Hamas war. In this exhibit, Ai continues his defense of free speech, with button-adorned block letters spelling out profanity-laden catchphrases across World War II military stretchers and tents. Alongside these works are re-creations of pieces from the Western art historical canon made out of Legos, a material that’s become his trademark in recent years.Skateboards, produced in collaboration with the Brussels-based art and social impact company The Skateroom, bearing images from Ai’s “Study of Perspective” series (1995-2017), affixed to an antique Chinese wooden chair from the artist’s conceptual work “Fairytale” (2007).Kathrin TschirnerWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      D.C.’s Planned Removal of Black Lives Matter Mural Reflects Mayor’s Delicate Position

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      Mayor Muriel Bowser’s decision comes amid calls by the president and other Republicans for more federal control of the city.On Wednesday morning in downtown Washington, D.C., Keyonna Jones stood on her artwork and remembered the time when she and six other artists were summoned by the mayor’s office to paint a mural in the middle of the night.“BLACK LIVES MATTER,” the mural read in bright yellow letters on a street running two city blocks, blaring the message at the White House sitting just across Lafayette Square. In June 2020, when Ms. Jones helped paint the mural, demonstrations were breaking out in cities nationwide in protest of George Floyd’s murder. The creation of Black Lives Matter Plaza was a statement of defiance from D.C.’s mayor, Muriel E. Bowser, who had clashed with President Trump, then in his first term, over the presence of federal troops in the streets of her city.But on Tuesday evening, the mayor announced the mural was going away.Ms. Jones said the news upset her. But, she added of the mayor in an interview, “I get where she is coming from.”The city of Washington is in an extraordinarily vulnerable place these days. Republicans in Congress have introduced legislation that would end D.C.’s already limited power to govern itself, stripping residents of the ability to elect a mayor and city council. Mr. Trump himself has said that he supports a federal takeover of Washington, insisting to reporters that the federal government would “run it strong, run it with law and order, make it absolutely, flawlessly beautiful.” In recent days, the administration has been considering executive orders in pursuit of his vision for the city.Potential laws and orders aside, the administration has already fired thousands of federal workers, leaving residents throughout the city without livelihoods and, according to the city’s official estimate, potentially costing Washington around $1 billion in lost revenue over the next three years.Given all this, Ms. Bowser, a Democrat, described her decision about Black Lives Matter Plaza as a pragmatic calculation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Culture wars: Trump’s takeover of arts is straight from the dictator playbook

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      In 1937, leaders of Germany’s Third Reich hosted two simultaneous art exhibitions in Munich. One, titled the Great German Art Exhibition, featured art viewed by the regime as appropriate and aspirational for the ideal Aryan society – orderly and triumphant, with mostly blond people in heroic poses amid pastoral German landscapes. The other showcased what Adolf Hitler and his followers deemed “degenerate art” (“Entartete Kunst”). The works, chaotically displayed and saddled with commentary disparaging “the sick brains of those who wielded the brush or pencil”, were abstract, profane, modernist and produced by the proclaimed enemies of the Reich – Jewish people, communists or those suspected of being either.The Degenerate Art exhibition, which later toured the country, opened a day after Hitler declared “merciless war” on cultural disintegration. The label applied to virtually all German modernist art, as well as anything deemed “an insult to German feeling”. The term and the dueling art exhibitions were part and parcel of Hitler’s propaganda efforts to consolidate power and bolster the regime via cultural production. The Nazis used culture as a crucial lever of control, to demean scapegoated groups, glorify the party and “make the genius of the race visible to that race”, argued the French scholar Eric Michaud in The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany. Political control and suppression of dissent were one thing; art, said Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, was “no mere peacetime amusement, but a sharp spiritual weapon for war”.Earlier this month, Donald Trump took the unprecedented step of naming himself as chair of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, one of the nation’s premier cultural centers, after purging the board of Biden appointees and installing a slate of unqualified donors and loyalists. “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS, OR OTHER ANTI-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA”, the US president wrote on Truth Social. (The center hosted a nominal amount of acts with drag elements.) Days later, Trump was formally voted in by the board – “unanimously”, he noted on Truth Social in a Putin-esque flourish. “There’s no more woke in this country,” he told reporters.The move drew outcry from performers, artists and more, but still went through. The Kennedy Center’s trustees are presidential appointees, so technically it is vulnerable to such flexes of control, as are other federally supported institutions such as the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution and DC’s consortium of national museums. Some of Trump’s cultural decrees trend ridiculous, such as an executive order calling for a “national garden of American heroes”, or the continued presence of Kid Rock. Others are more insidious – after long threatening to defund the National Endowment for the Arts during his first term, Trump has imposed restrictions on its terms, barring federal grants for projects concerning Maga’s favorite targets – diversity and “gender ideology”.View image in fullscreenWhile the takeover of the Kennedy Center may seem less dire and court less furor than, say, his dismantling of the civil service, Trump’s efforts to exert control over art typify the strategy of a dictator. Comparisons of the Trump presidency to Nazi Germany may be overdone and easily dismissed – even with Republican efforts to ban books in schools deemed “inappropriate”, among many other parallels, Maga and the Third Reich are not the same – but the new administration’s cultural decrees are very much a part of the authoritarian playbook to suppress dissent, scapegoat select groups and seize power.Pick your oppressive regime throughout time and you will find efforts to control the arts. Some of the most renowned artefacts from ancient Rome, from Virgil’s Aeneid to Trajan’s Column, were commissioned by emperors to vivify their divine right to power, celebrate military conquests and cement preferred narratives. The Stalinist regime in the 1930s Soviet Union abolished all independent artistic institutions, required cultural production to exist in absolute allegiance to the party, and systemically executed all of the country’s Ukrainian folk poets. Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution identified “old culture” as one of the four threats to be eradicated as part of his reshaping of Chinese society, which killed more than a million people. After Augusto Pinochet took over Chile in 1973, the regime arrested, tortured and exiled muralists. In her 2012 book Brazilian Art Under Dictatorship, the art historian Claudia Calirman recalls how the museum director Niomar Moniz Sodré Bittencourt hid artworks and advised artists on how to leave the country after officials from the country’s military regime entered her museum and demanded the removal of “dangerous” images – a claim not far removed from the Trump administration’s fearmongering around “gender ideology” and “threats” to children.These tactics continue in the present, carried out in some cases by Trump’s expressed allies. The same Brazilian dictatorship that overtook and blocked art exhibitions between 1968 and 1975 is today championed by the Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro, who worked during his time as president to rewrite the regime’s reputation. On his first day in office in 2019, Bolsonaro dissolved Brazil’s ministry of culture. He also halved funding for the Rouanet Law, a measure that publicly supports artists, and appointed rightwing cultural figures with little relevant experience to prominent cultural positions. In Poland, the rightwing Law and Justice party has tried to rewrite history at the second world war museum in Gdańsk and dismissed its director, Paweł Machcewicz; in recent years, Italy’s rightwing minister of culture, Alberto Bonisoli, threatened to not renew the contracts of non-Italian museum directors. Much ado was made in the western press when Cuba jailed the performance artist Danilo Maldonado for criticizing the Castro regime in 2017, or when China’s ruling party placed the renowned artist Ai Weiwei under house arrest.View image in fullscreenBut perhaps no one models what Trump aspires to be, and hopes to do, more than Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who since his election in 2010 has rewritten the constitution, changed electoral law to favor his Fidesz party, positioned allies as heads of most media outlets and overhauled the justice system. And as part of his consolidation of power into full dictatorship, he has taken control of the country’s cultural institutions, managing their output and enshrining censorship. Starting when Fidesz first gained municipal power in 2006, the party has purged the boards of local theaters and installed Fidesz loyalists. In 2010, Orbán took over public institutions via appointment of governing bodies that could grant or withhold funds according to the organization’s willingness to heed demands. In 2013, he dismissed the artistic director of the National Theatre in Budapest, Róbert Alföldi, on account of his resistance to political interference and his sexuality, viewed as offensive by the homophobic regime.By 2019, Orbán could feasibly declare an era “of spiritual order, a kind of prevailing mood, perhaps even taste … determined by cultural trends, collective beliefs and social customs. This is the task we are now faced with: we must embed the political system in a cultural era.” His government subsequently banned funding for gender studies at universities and passed a “culture law” tying funding of theaters to their ability to “actively protect the interests of the nation’s survival, wellbeing and growth”, a censorship measure that significantly chilled the country’s art scene.Such a measure is not dissimilar, in intent and execution, from Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center, nor his new mandates on the National Endowment for the Arts, which has already been subject to decades’ worth of US culture wars. Those wars are heating up – if history and very recent precedent are anything to go by, then Trump and his party’s efforts to chip away at US cultural autonomy, at individual and institutional creative expression, will be one of his most corrosive and anti-democratic legacies. More