The president of the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C , Michael M. Kaiser, is a great disappointment.  The food is still dire, the programs still tell you  little, and the only change visible to the paying audience under the direction of Mr. Kaiser is that you pay $22 to park in the garage for a single performance (go regularly and you should be able to buy the Kennedy Center).  If you go to the opera you are going to one of the most undistinguished opera houses in the world; sorry, the most undistinguished.  Live opera is expensive and a rare treat.  It should have  a touch of glamor and something better than the stale sandwiches and Coca Cola currently on offer in the foyer.

And yet Mr. Kaiser has been handed (lumbered  with?) the honoring ceremonies beloved of performers, and you have to have some sympathy for him.  You can barely open the pages of  the Washington Post, without spotting yet another “honoring” ceremony.   It amounts to a one of the few growth industries in the U S.

What is it about performing artists that requires them to be “recognized” all the time? Isn’t the inevitable standing ovation at every performance enough?  Are they not paid handsomely enough?

Now Latinos are up in arms because only two Latino performers have been ” recognized” in recent years, and the Latino population constitutes 18 per cent of the population.  So now we have to have honor quotas?

The Brits do it with tongue in cheek.  They  make successful artists Members of the Order of the (non-existent) British Empire.  Sometimes they make pop singers actual knights, to the disgust of the general population (see Sir Paul Macartney at the Queen’s Jubilee. Oh dear!).  But at least you don’t have  the expense of an “honoring” ceremony at the Kennedy Center, or have to wade through boring accounts in the Washington Post.

Why do these people never talk about the paying customers?  Epicureans would abolish it all. Pleasing an audience should be reward enough.