Timothée Chalamet is under fire this week and losing traction in the Best Actor Oscar race for saying just about the most obvious thing in the world: No one cares about ballet or opera in 2026.
Here’s the exact quote from the “Dune” and “Marty Supreme” stars during a recent CNN town hall: “I don’t want to work in ballet or opera or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive even if no one cares about it anymore.’ All respect to all the ballet and opera people out there.”
The reaction was swift and fierce. According to the BBC, Canadian mezzo-soprano Deepa Johnny described Chalamet’s comments as a “disappointing view,” while American artist Franz Szony wrote, “Two classic art forms that have been around for hundreds of years, both requiring an enormous amount of talent and discipline that this man will never possess.”
Timothée Chalamet, right, watches in the first quarter of Game Six of the Eastern Conference Second Round NBA Playoffs between the New York Knicks and the Boston Celtics at Madison Square Garden on May 16, 2025 in New York City. (Al Bello/Getty Images)
But for today’s pretty boy, like Hollywood, who the hell are these people?
When I was ten years old, Mikhail Baryshnikov was the greatest ballet dancer in the world. He was as famous as Larry Bird or Doc Gooden, as well as the greatest opera singer of the time, Luciano Pavarotti. That’s gone today.
Today, almost no American has any idea who the greatest ballet dancer or opera singer in the world is, because it’s not for them anymore. The visual performing arts have become a bubble of progressive intolerance. They don’t even want us unwashed unbelievers to be involved.
The fine performing arts are the last ditch in which the sad wokesters hide.
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In the 1950s, collections of the great works of the West appeared. You may have seen some of these leather-bound books in your grandparents’ homes. They were very expensive, but publishers couldn’t print them fast enough.
The middle class ate it up.
On any given night in the 1950s and 1960s you could see Shakespeare playing on television, or Leonard Bernstein describing symphonies, or great philosophers of the day lecturing. But in the 1970s it was decided that this was a bit much for the masses.
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The Pavarottis and Baryshnikovs would survive into the 1990s, but by the turn of the millennium that was over. The leftist elites had turned opera and ballet into their own private domain, a dwindling and now dying domain that Chalamet rightly calls out.
Workers install Donald J. Trump above current signage at the Kennedy Center on Friday, Dec. 19, 2025, in Washington. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo)
The problem for opera and ballet, and also for pure theater and musicals, is that they no longer looked for an audience, but started looking for subsidies. A bunch of woke, rich white people can give you money to produce the first Inuit opera, but that doesn’t mean anyone will want to see it.
This also applies to Inuits.
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Part of what Chalamet realizes here is that opera and ballet have been protected for fifty years. But protected from whom?
The urge to diversify and move away from the standard repertoire that everyone loves – for a reason – made this art a delicate flower for the elites among us, and not a strong crop that nourishes the soul of the masses.
Now the same people who refuse to attend their supposedly beloved opera and ballet will not grace the doors of the Trump Kennedy Center performances in protest of their own performance, with the result that there is now no audience for these forms.
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Sadly, opera and ballet may really be dead. There may be no one left in these art forms to breathe life back into their bleak, awakened corpses, but Chamamet knows that films may be able to avoid this fate. Maybe.
I suspect Hollywood’s new, non-offensive “it guy” will reverse all of this, making me long for the days of filmmakers like John Cassavettes who knew how to tell the industry and its elites to stay where the sun don’t shine.
But his point still stands. It’s absurd to even argue. Ballet and opera have made themselves irrelevant by soothing the shibboleths of wokeness and obeying its rules. Until that stops, they will remain dying forms.
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I think Chalamet has probably learned his lesson here, and his chastisement may well endure. But they cannot chastise us, and if they want to invite us back to the visual arts, we will be here.
But the makers and shakers of opera, ballet, theater, painting and sculpture must be warned that while you are wasting your legacy of centuries, we may be just beginning our own.
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