If today's U.S. House budget votes occur as advertised, I'll be especially attentive to the proposed cuts for the National Endowment for the Arts, a credentialed batch of snooty federal busybodies whose job it is to elevate your sense of beauty.
Whatever else art may be, it is intensely personal to the artist and to his followers. Divergent tastes gave us Grant Wood and Jackson Pollock. Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali. Robert Frost and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Less happily, we also have the guy who took your money to support himself as he slaved to write a poem which, in its entirety, reads: "ligght."
Robert Mapplethorpe found success taking pictures of himself with a bullwhip up his butt and of a Crucifix soaking in urine. The NDEA took your money to support him, too.
If you wished to personify absolute evil vis-a-vis the arts, you would need two characters. The first is a government thug who refused Mapplethorpe permission to create or display his penetrated butt shot. The second is the government thug who can and does make you pay for them.
cf. Oceania, Minitrue
No comments:
Post a Comment