Sylvester Stallone is Right for the NEA
- Tim Cusack
- Jan 2, 2017
- 3 min read
On December 15 the Daily Mail in London published an exclusive report that Donald Trump had tapped Hollywood action star Sylvester Stallone to be his nominee as the head of the National Endowment for the Arts (the twelfth since the agency’s founding in 1965).
A subsequent story in the New York Times seems to have laid the rumor to rest, with Stallone expressing interest in a government position only if it were related to veteran’s issue. At the moment, it would appear that we still don’t know who the administration is going to put forward for one of the most important jobs in the US arts economy.
In the meanwhile, the reaction of the gatekeepers in the realms of Art to the original announcement was predictably aghast, with a dash of de rigueur condescension thrown in for good measure. Ben Davis writing for Arts Net couldn’t resist playing college boy to Stallone’s working class townie by seizing on the actor’s quote that Trump is “a great Dickensian character.”
In the Stallone movie version of this exchange, one can imagine the Davis avatar in a cardigan and argyles exaggeratingly scratching his head as he turns to the other WASPs swarming around him and jibes, “We’re racking our brains as to which ‘Dickensian’ character the guy has in mind.”
For the record, I have no idea if there is a specific corollary in the Victorian novelist’s work to the New York real estate developer, but that’s because my knowledge of Dickens is woefully inadequate despite two college degrees. I’m assuming that Stallone has read his Dickens, or at least enough to make what’s actually a pretty astute observation. Donald Trump—from his evocative name to his ridiculous orange comb over to his rapacious capitalism to his boasting about nonexistent accomplishments—is exactly like one of the over-the-top villains from Dickens’s populist literature.
This is the reason why we need someone like Stallone to run the NEA—not because I’m a fan of the content of his work but because I admire a man who lacks a formal college degree but who’s taken it upon himself to gain some measure of cultural knowledge. (He received a BFA from the University of Miami but only after the school agreed to count his body of work as an acceptable substitute for the courses he didn’t complete while there.)
I admire a man who never attended film school but who created one of the most iconic motion pictures of the twentieth century. I admire a man who has maintained a decades-long painterly practice despite no art training. In fact, according to Stallone the character of Rocky Balboa first emerged for him in a painting he made in 1975. In the language of art world grant writing, Stallone is an autodidactic, multidisciplinary outsider artist. Unlike Trump, though, he’s not a con artist—he’s actually skilled at what he does.
He’s also a star, and that might be a necessary and crucial advantage as we face the specter of total Republican control of the federal government. For decades, conservative voices like the Heritage Foundation have been calling for the total elimination of the agency. Having a celebrity of Stallone’s stature advocating for it could very well make the difference in whether or not the NEA survives the Trump years. He may be a Republican, but it’s also very clear that he recognizes the potentially life-changing power the arts can have in the lives of ordinary, working-class people—the kind of people he comes from.
In a cultural industries environment where having a viable career in the arts is often tied to admittance at elite private institutions, such as the Ivy Leagues, Stanford, or Sarah Lawrence, having someone running the agency who’s not from this network of privilege may not be such a bad idea. Half of the previous NEA chairs attended one of the above institutions. Maybe it’s time to see what someone outside of the system, but who understands its potential, could accomplish with its resources.