Alec Baldwin gets paid millions of dollars to be photographed having sex with his wife, Kim Basinger; he is, after all, a movie star, an artist who works in film. (See, for example, their movie The Getaway.) But he is also a man of substance, of strongly held political convictions, as the ever- alert Media Research Center has documented.
“I believe that the people who run the Republican Party in this country are really rotten, nasty, horrible human beings,” Baldwin told US magazine last month. Newt Gingrich, he went on, is “evil.” And so when Alec Baldwin came to Washington earlier this month, is it any wonder that he should have been received warmly by . . . Newt Gingrich?
It should be no wonder at all. Republicans may indeed be really rotten, nasty, horrible human beings, but they seem intent this Easter season on loving those who revile them, and one sure way to show it is to preserve the National Endowment for the Arts, which they had previously vowed to eliminate. This is the federal agency on whose behalf Alec Baldwin came to Washington to lobby. He wants Republicans to give it more money, and they don’t want to let him down.
March 11 was Arts Advocacy Day in Washington. More than 400 people from 43 states, according to the press release, came to town to persuade congressmen that federal lucre should continue to flow from the NEA to their various museums, dance troupes, film schools, crafts fairs, and macrame classes. Among the artists lobbying with Baldwin were Marlo “That Girl” Thomas, Blair ” Days and Nights of Molly Dodd” Brown, Brenda “Mrs. Robert Klein” Boozer, and Richard Masur. (“An actor,” an arts spokesman said. “You’d recognize him if you saw him. Maybe.”) On the fateful morning, Baldwin and his colleagues descended on the office of Republican congressman Mark Foley of Florida, and when they mentioned they would like to see Gingrich, Foley called the speaker directly. He told them to come right over.
Participants were no more than vague about the content of the 15-minute parley. “It was a very substantive meeting,” said one of the arts people. “We talked hard numbers, in terms of what arts funding does for communities.” Gingrich, according to participants, thanked the lobbyists for starting a ” genuine dialogue” and invited them back in April to continue it at greater length — over dinner, he suggested. “He seemed more receptive to keeping the channels of dialogue open than he has been vocal about in the past,” said a participant. Foley particularly was impressed with Baldwin’s group. “I think they are forceful advocates,” he told the Washington Post. “They come with a celebrity resume.” In 1995, it should be noted, Foley helped organize long-forgotten House task forces on eliminating the departments of commerce, education, and energy. He declined to be interviewed for this story, but his spokesman said of his time with Baldwin, “Mark was kind of a star for a day. And he got a lot of press.”
The high spirits continued throughout the week. NEA chairman Jane Alexander appeared before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the Interior to plead for more money. She seemed very pleased with her reception. The agency got $ 99.5 million last year, down from $ 168 million in 1994, and in his budget President Clinton has asked for a 35 percent increase this year. There’s a hitch: a statement, issued by the GOP House leadership in 1995 and signed by majority leader Dick Armey, announcing that the NEA “shall cease to exist in two years.”
It’s not much of a hitch, as it turns out. With Chairman Alexander before them, the subcommittee wanted none of this unpleasantness. “House Panel Praises Endowment for the Arts,” headlined the New York Times the next day. “GOP Effort to Kill Arts Endowment Loses Momentum in House,” said the Washington Post. Supporters of the arts endowment agreed that keeping the agency at its current level of funding is now a “worst-case scenario.” Congressman Ralph Regula, the subcommittee’s chairman, said that the agency’s future funding was still wide open. Other congressmen praised Alexander extravagantly during the hearing. Rep. Zach Wamp, a staunch conservative from Tennessee who said he still wants to eliminate the NEA, nevertheless worried aloud, and incongruously, that the government wasn’t doing enough to support the arts.
To all of which Alexander responded: “Wow.”
Watchers of the Republican Revolution — those terrified by it and those who cheered it on — will second her sentiments. For after two years, arguments for and against eliminating the arts endowment remain essentially unchanged. “It’s art patronage for an elite group,” Newt Gingrich said, with characteristic vividness, in 1995, “and it is funding for avant-garde people who are explicitly not accepted by most of the taxpayers who are coerced into paying for it.”
This seems still to be the case. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, who as chairman of an education subcommittee oversees the agency, has continued to collect evidence of its derelictions, even as many of his colleagues fold on the issue. The NEA, he’s discovered, has continued to fund sexually explicit films and books. And coming into contact with one of these can still be a jarring experience for the taxpayer. Open up the frontispiece of Mexico Trilogy by D. N. Steufloten, for example, which is published by something called FC2 in (of all places) Normal, Illinois, and you will find the logo of the NEA: the art world’s Good Housekeeping seal. Turn the page and you will find: “Once to see what a pretty Spanish boy would take from her, she inserted twenty-four large rubies into his rectum. His smile grew wider with each gem. At the twenty-fourth his face suddenly paled. Blood poured from between his pomegranate buttocks. . . .” Another day, another taxpayer’s dollar.
Hoekstra has braved much ridicule for drawing attention to such NEA-funded works, most notably from the New York Times columnist Frank Rich. And it’s true that whoever brings up the issues of obscenity and indecency will appear, in the eyes of the artistically hip, a hopeless prig at best and a hayseed at worst — someone unfit even to watch Alec Baldwin having sex with his wife. “FC2 is an extremely prestigious publisher of fiction,” NEA spokesman Cherie Simon said. “Anybody who knows anything about this can’t believe they’re being criticized.” As for another NEAbacked film, Watermelon Woman, which contains sexually explicit scenes, Simon says, ” Yes, we funded it. We’re proud we funded it. It got a rave review in the New York Times. You should read it.”
Worried that the indecency issue might be losing its potency, Hoekstra and his staff make their argument against the NEA on other fronts as well. They point out that even as the NEA’s funding has declined, total spending on the arts — state, local, and private — has risen. Like all threatened bureaucracies, the NEA invokes vivid pictures of calamity — shuttered museums, cobwebbed concert halls, schoolchildren with the hollow-eyed, spectral look of the art-deprived — should its funding cease. In fact, Hoekstra points out, NEA funding accounts for roughly 1 percent of all arts spending in the United States. Attendance for arts events is up; employment in the arts is up; and artists as a class are making more money than ever before. What’s more, NEA funding is oddly dispersed, with one fifth of its direct grants going to rich organizations like the Metropolitan Opera, and one third being spread around six of the country’s largest cities. The argument that arts funding is a redistribution of wealth from the poor upwards still holds.
And perhaps the most subtle argument against the NEA — that the government is imposing on the private art world a kind of federally sponsored orthodoxy – – is conceded even by the NEA. “If you’ve got an NEA grant, you can leverage it,” says the agency spokesman, Cherie Simon. “It’s an imprimatur. So you can go to, say, Coke for more support, and they’ll know you’re good. Otherwise, they don’t know who you are or whether you’re any good.” As a consequence, artists have an enormous advantage in the money chase if they court the favor of government.
“No other entity does this,” said Alexander. “If the endowment didn’t exist, you would have to invent it.”
Most likely, she needn’t worry. Despite the House leadership’s pledge to eliminate the agency, Armey stresses that opponents don’t have the 218 votes they need to do the job. In fact, support for the agency, following Arts Advocacy Day, may have risen to 300 votes, according to some vote-counters. March 11 capped a new sophistication in the arts lobby. “It wasn’t just artists up there, like in the early ’90s, talking about controversial art and the cutting edge and Mapplethorpe,” says one arts lobbyist. “We got smart. We had businessmen up there, teachers, people from back home who give money to their congressmen. It finally dawned on us, Do you know how many rich Republicans sit on arts boards around this country? We’ve got them on our side, and that makes a very big difference.”
Several congressmen report hearing from campaign contributors — ” supporters,” as they’re euphemistically called — upset that their local arts outlet might feel the pinch if the NEA dies. “They come up to you after a dinner,” says one Republican, “and say, ‘What’s up? You know my wife’s very active on the board of the’ — fill in the blank, chamber-music group, whatever — ‘and this NEA thing is really important to US.'”
Even old allies in the anti-NEA cause have vanished. I called Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a veteran of the wars of the early 1990s, when battle was joined against such NEA-backed celebrities as “performance artists” Annie Sprinkle and the Hershey-smeared Karen Finley, and Robert Mapplethorpe, who was dead. Rohrabacher has no comment. “Dana feels very strongly that you have to focus on three issues, four at most, and the NEA is no longer one of them,” his spokesman said. “He’s fought that fight. He’s focusing the debate elsewhere. He’s moved on.”
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
