First it tried the Alec Baldwin gambit — send Hollywood stars to Capitol Hill to do grip ‘n’ grins with hostile lawmakers. Now the National Endowment for the Arts is stepping up its campaign for survival. With its latest round of grants earlier this month, the NEA has cleverly dropped its open support of the bizarre pornographic works that made it notorious. Instead, the NEA is transforming itself into a full-time social-work agency, just out to do a few good deeds.
Typical of the new NEA are grants like the $ 20,000 to the Los Angeles Poverty Department. No, it’s not a soup kitchen. This LAPD is a theater troupe for the homeless, who, absent the support of the NEA, would no doubt be simply panhandlers, instead of panhandlers who tread the boards.
Worried about AIDS? So is the National Endowment for the Arts, which is giving Concerned Citizens for Humanity of Hartford, Connecticut $ 75,000 for STOPAIDS, “a statewide design project tailored to educate at-risk youth and persons with hearing disabilities on the problem of HIV/AIDS.”
And if you thought we were getting too harsh on illegal immigrants, the NEA has a way to smooth over our differences. At the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, U.S. Latino and Mexican-borderland artists will be collaborating on a series of performances called “Gateways: New Creative Collaborations with Mexico.” The price of the gateways: $ 125,000.
Maybe next time, they’ll cut out the middleman and just give grants to congressmen directly.
