Kennedy Center Honorees are recognized during a ceremony at the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall, attended by the President and First Lady, in which performances by other artists celebrate the honoree’s work. The format is designed to make visible the cultural influence of the honoree — to show, through other performers’ engagement with the work, what the work has meant and how it has moved through the culture. When artists performed Tina Turner’s songs in that ceremony, they were performing a body of work that had crossed the threshold from entertainment to cultural artifact.
The Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, received in 2018, represented the music industry’s parallel recognition of what the Kennedy Center had acknowledged thirteen years earlier. The Lifetime Achievement Award is not a competitive Grammy; it is an honorary recognition by the Recording Academy of a career’s total contribution to recorded music. It sits alongside the competitive Grammys that Turner had won in the 1970s and 1980s — the “Proud Mary” Grammy, the four from Private Dancer, the Grammy for “One of the Living” from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome — as a different kind of recognition, one that looks backward across a complete career rather than forward from a current work.
Together, the Kennedy Center Honors and the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award frame Tina Turner’s place in American culture in a way that is distinct from commercial success. Commercial success is temporary; it belongs to a moment. Cultural canonization is a different proposition: it is the institutional claim that the work will outlast the moment it was made in, that it speaks to something in the culture that persists. The institutions making that claim about Tina Turner’s work were doing so on the basis of the full arc from “A Fool in Love” in 1960 through the Private Dancer era and beyond — a body of work that spanned six decades of American popular music.