Let’s say you go into business manufacturing widgets. After dedicating a big chunk of your young life to designing these widgets and perfecting your manufacturing and production process, you come to a sobering conclusion: Nobody wants to buy them. Despite all the hard work you put in displaying them for the public, nobody’s buying. Sure, people stop by and check out the selection; some snicker others walk away with furrowed brows. But no one leaves any cash in the till.
What do you do?
For most people, there would be only one answer: Close up shop, settle your debts if you can (or declare bankruptcy if you can’t), and start looking for another way to make a living.
For others, however, there’s a different option: Ask the government to use the one unique power that only government has—the power to use deadly force to accomplish any goal it sets for itself—to force people to buy your widgets.
After all, you’ve worked long and hard at this widget thing, and it’s not your fault that the crass consumers don’t understand how much more fulfilled their lives would be with a few of your widgets in their home. Since the consumers obviously aren’t acting in their own best interests, you call on the government to help.
Come on, Neal. The government’s not in the business of floating failing businesses, is it? Think again, folks. This very scenario plays itself out day after day, from the federal to the local government level, all over the country. The plunderers are people who call themselves “artists,” and what they produce is a brand of garbage that’s known—to them, anyway—as “art.”
The problem they face is that their work just doesn’t sell in the free marketplace. And so, rather than actually trying to get a real job where they trade some marketable skill for a wage, they ask the government to step in on their behalf. Their goal is to get the government to take the money it’s seized from the taxpayers and spend it on these often grotesque works of art, which most taxpayers would sooner haul off to a Dumpster than frame over the couch.
In one of the most incredible scams ever perpetrated on the American taxpayer, tens of thousands of marginal artists across the country are now using the police power of government to compensate for their lack of actual marketable artistic skills.
My outrage over forced government transfers of money from those who earned it to those who produce unmarketable art was born over a poem.
To be more precise: a one-word poem.
In the 1960s, shortly after the National Endowment of the Arts was formed, the sum of $750 was seized from some hapless wage earner and transferred to the account of a budding literary genius.
Now $750 (a few thousand in today’s dollars) may not seem like much, but in the early 1960s this money could have solved a lot of problems—or provided a lot of pleasure—for the person who earned it. But nooooooooooo. The government needed it, because it had to underwrite some fool who wanted his magazine to publish this one-word poem.
Are you ready?
Here’s the poem:
There, now, I’ve done everything I could to spruce up this work of art. I centered it on the page for you. I put it in a nifty little box with a nice border. I even sprang for a fancy typeface. Do you feel enriched? Enlightened? More in touch with the inner you?
Hasn’t the American Way of Life has been improved in some grand way by the incredible experience you’ve enjoyed in reading that inspired poem?
Aren’t you glad that our government confiscated some poor sap’s wages to make sure this work of genius got published?
If so, why don’t you take the time to tell me and the rest of us uncultured slobs out here where in our Constitution the Imperial Federal Government of the United States derives any authority to seize the property of a private citizen for such an asinine purpose?
Believe it or not, “lighght”—published in the Chicago Review in 1968—won Aram Saroyan1 the NEA poetry award and $750 in taxpayer money.
Saroyan later scammed another $1,500 from taxpayers when editor George Plimpton decided to reprint it in the NEA-supported American Literary Anthology.
The money probably went to buy pot. (Wait—that’s no baseless charge. A biography of Aram Saroyan at the University of Connecticut, where his papers are housed, notes that he smoked marijuana in the 1960s and never graduated from college.)
Not everyone was pleased with this NEA grant. When word got out about it, William Scherle, a Republican congressman from Iowa, demanded to know what “Lighght” meant. Was it a typo? A joke? A con game?
“If my kid came home from school spelling like that, I would have stood him in the corner with a dunce cap,” Scherle reportedly said.
When one of Scherle’s assistants contacted the editor of the American Literary Anthology to ask what Saroyan’s poem meant, however, he didn’t get a straight answer.
“You are from the Midwest,” Plimpton replied. “You are culturally deprived, so you would not understand it anyway.” Charming.
For what it’s worth—and that’s much less than $750 or $1,500—the question of the literary value of the one-word poem was eventually answered, in a way. Saroyan himself tried to explain the seven-letter word years later. This alleged poet said that by manipulating the spelling of “Light” to “Lighght,” he found a way for his poem “to be, not mean.”
Oh, yeah. Certainly clears it up for me.
He explained further:
“Part of the aim seems to have been to make this ineffable2 (light) into a thing, as it were—to change it from a verb (the agency of illumination) to a noun that yet radiates as light does. The double ghgh seems to work in that way.”
Aram, listen to me carefully and do exactly as I say. Put the pipe down and back away slowly.
You know, now that I’ve been thinking about it, I’m an artist, too! My art form is words! I craft words into carefully constructed sentences and paragraphs designed to inform, amuse, outrage, infuriate, and obfuscate! I’m only on about two hundred stations around the country. That makes me feel like my art is being rejected. I think I’ll just go apply for an NEA grant for a few million to pay radio stations to take my show. That’s how Air America did it! (Well…taking funds from Alzheimer’s programs and Boys and Girls Clubs isn’t exactly like applying for a federal grant, but they did have to pay radio stations to carry their programming.) Why shouldn’t I give that a try?
Maybe because I still have some self-respect. Not a lot…but enough.
Was Aram’s effort poetry or not? I have an opinion, in case you haven’t guessed—but that doesn’t really matter. This chapter isn’t about the relative merits, or lack thereof, of Aram Saroyan or mini-malist poetry.
If there’s a market for this stuff—that is, if people want to read it so much that they’re willing to pay money for the privilege—then I’m all for it. That’s free enterprise in action! On the other hand, if a supposed artist is not able to support himself (and whatever expensive little habits he may have picked up in the swinging sixties) with the work he produces, then perhaps it’s time for him to look elsewhere for an income. I hear Wal-Mart is hiring.
In what universe does the NEA justify reaching into my wallet or yours and stealing money for the purpose of enriching someone like Saroyan? Exactly how does this seizure of private property protect life, defend freedom, or support the general welfare of our nation?
Now, in case you suspect that I’m unable to see both sides of an issue, I can tell you at least one way that government spending on the arts benefits the public.
Whatever town you’re in, it’s easy to find a government office. Just look for the hideous sculpture by the side of the road—sure as you’re born, that building lurking behind it is the local government outpost. (Step inside, and you’re sure to find even more ugly welfare art.)
Years ago, the Richard B. Russell Federal Office Building was built in Atlanta. The taxpayers, of course, were forced to spend millions of dollars on ugly welfare art for the building. One work of “art” consisted of a large torn piece of canvas with paint splattered all over it. When contractors were doing the final cleanup, they came upon this work of art, mistook it for an old painter’s drop cloth, and threw it in a Dumpster. When the artist discovered his precious piece of work in the trash, he threw what only could be described as a “diva hissy fit.”3 To anyone who cared to listen, he complained that the people in charge of postconstruction cleanup—and most of the ordinary citizens out there—just weren’t sophisticated enough to appreciate his artistic masterwork.
Me, I think the people of Atlanta are the smart ones: To this day, that piece of dog squeeze hanging on the wall of the Russell building is universally known as the “drop cloth.”
Every time a politician votes to dump a load of taxpayer money into the artistic community, that politician is telling you and every other taxpayer that he believes it’s more important for the government to subsidize an unmarketable artist than it is for you to spend your money on things you need—things like health care, home payments, debt reduction, and your children’s education.
Unbridled arrogance.
And don’t for a minute think that the “Lighght” fiasco was an isolated incident. Oh, no. The NEA never fails to deliver.
Before we proceed, a warning: Some of the case studies that follow get pretty rough. I’m trying to get you angry. I’m trying to get you so steamed that you reach out to your elected officials and tell them that up with this you will not put. These examples, grotesque as they may be, illustrate how little respect these welfare artists, and the politicians who pander to them, have for you and the hard work you put into earning a living—before they get ahold of it.
Here we go:
- A grant of $30,000 to Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art, sponsor of a traveling exhibition of photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe. Termed “homoerotic,” the pictures included graphic sexual images such as a self-portrait of Mapplethorpe with a bullwhip sticking out of his you-know-what; a little girl with her skirt lifted to expose her genitals; and, oh yes, an especially lovely photograph of a man urinating into another man’s mouth.
- A $75,000 grant to the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for an exhibit by Andres Serrano that included a photograph titled “Piss Christ.” That’s the now-infamous photo of a plastic crucifix immersed in a jar of the artist’s urine.4
- A grant to The Kitchen, a Manhattan theater, which sponsored a live performance by a porno star named Annie Sprinkle. While masturbating on stage, the performer actually commented, “Usually I get paid a lot of money for this, but tonight it’s government-funded.”
Angry yet? I am, but if you’re not there yet, here are a few other outrages:
- $70,000 for a show called “Degenerate with a Capital D.” This exhibit included the remains of “artist” Shawn Eichman’s own aborted baby.
- $127,000 in 1990 and $125,000 in 1989 to the Center on Puppetry Arts, which happened to feature a puppet show depicting oral sex between puppets.
- $50,000 to Living Stage, which encouraged elementary schoolers to shout “Bullshit!” at the top of their lungs during a performance.
- $20,000 to an arts festival that included a display of sex toys and Bibles, which subsequently were set ablaze. The name of this one was “Bible Burn.” Nice.
- $6,025 to Ann Wilchusky for “sculpting in space.” As a pilot, I was particularly interested in this one: To this artist, “sculpting in space” involved the refined art of throwing crepe paper out of an airplane.5
- Several grants to a theater in New York where one Johanna Went performed with giant tampons, satanic bunnies, three-foot feces, dildos, and a giant vagina headdress which she squeezed as white liquid gushed from her mouth.
- $204,390 to the Franklin Furnace in New York, which put on a show featuring an eighty-six-year-old woman boasting of her sexual exploits, and one lesbian inserting her foot into another lesbian’s vagina.
- $40,000 to the Gay Sunshine Press to produce “alternative” publications, including illustrations of sex between men and animals.
Oh, and this one I love.
Do you remember Andrew Cunanan? He was the serial killer from San Diego who murdered Gianni Versace at the front door of his home in Miami some years back. Well, three artists at the La Jolla Playhouse in California developed a musical around Cunanan and his exploits. That’s right, a musical about a serial killer.
When three playwrights need some money, what better place to go than to the American taxpayers?
That’s right, the taxpayer-funded NEA took a whopping $35,000 of its plunder and gave it to these playwrights. That’s $35,000 taken from families who earned it, and who presumably had a good use for it, dumped into the laps of some welfare artists to help them create their musical about a murderer.
I wonder if poor Aram Saroyan felt cheated? After all, he only got $2,250 out of the NEA.
What’s next? What about a live production on the life of O. J. Simpson? Now that the private sector isn’t going to publish his book, perhaps he can apply for a government NEA grant. I can picture the marquee now: If I Did It—The Musical!
I wonder what that will cost the American taxpayers?
There are some artists who’ve actually figured out a way to make you pay for their work without actually getting their hands on your tax money. They force you to buy it with your own after-tax money!
That’s the way it works in Naples, Florida. This artist moneygrab was launched as the “Percent for Art” plan, though was the name was later changed to “Dollar for Art.” The plan here is to make real estate developers set aside one dollar for every square foot of new development to buy art. This applies to any private project totaling at least $500,000, and to all city construction projects.
The art has to be located on the site of the development, in full public view. What’s more, the artwork must go through a three-step review process involving a Public Art Advisory Committee, a Design Review Board, and then the Naples City Council—two committees with no responsibility to the developer whatsoever, and then the local government. And you know who ends up footing the bill, don’t you? Whoever buys the property. What a deal!
Cows have three stomachs, which they use to turn grass into cow flops. Now the City of Naples has a similar process—and I’m sure it will produce similar results.