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This is the comment that #2 made to Steve on the other thread:

reader (the Second) said:
You are amazingly offbase and uninformed about what art is, what art funding is about.

Public support for the arts is to promote art for all citizens.

Well, I guess that Steve isn't the only one that is offbase and uninformed. Count me in that bunch, too.

I'm not saying that art is all bad, but I found an article that talks about the kind of disgusting filth that you NEA art lovers want our tax dollars spent on. It's a free country. Spend your money on it if you want to. But don't spend mine.

I'm highlighting the really gross and filthy stuff, so adults only!!! Don't read any more unless you've got a bucket to puke in. :mad:



Following are a few examples of "art" (to stretch the term to its limit) that have made the rounds recently. Their only claim to fame is their offensiveness.

Sorrano and His 'Piss Christ.'

Andres Sorrano, a little-known "artist," simply filled a glass vat with his own urine and then dumped a photograph of a Crucifix in it. He imaginatively entitled this masterpiece "Piss Christ." For this magnificent and imaginative effort, he received a $15,000 award from the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA).

Urine tax dollars at work.

His "work" was selected for the Awards in the Visual Arts program of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art of Winston-Salem, North Carolina for display and tour.[20] This program, perhaps not coincidentally, is funded by The Rockefeller Foundation, which also heavily funds worldwide population control. This is an excellent example of how the population control cartel undermines the authority of those organizations (in this case, the Christian Church) who oppose their worldwide program of genocide.

Outside of Satanism, no more direct attack on the Person of God has ever been launched, and yet even so-called 'Good Christians' squabbled over Sorrano's "rights of expression." Even Jesus physically attacked the moneychangers who desecrated only His Father's house not his very Person.[21]

Sorrano's "art" was displayed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Carnegie-Mellon University Art Gallery in Pittsburgh, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art in Richmond, and the Stux Gallery in New York.

Sorrano's other works include "Piss God" and "Piss Pope." When asked what he would "work" with next, Sorrano replied "semen."

He was as good as his word. The following year, he displayed a series of photographs entitled "Ejaculate Trajectory." These consisted of photos of his own semen jetting across a black background in abstract patterns.[22]

The National Endowment for the Arts had previously awarded Sorrano another $15,000 of tax money in 1985 for "Creating artworks composed from human body parts and decapitated heads of animals exhibited in glass vats."[23]

It would be interesting to find out if Sorrano had the courage to 'create' a "Piss Martin Luther King," a "Piss Bella Abzug," or (we can hope, can't we?) a "Piss Patricia Schroeder." It would also be fascinating to see how far the artistic 'community' would go to defend Sorrano's freedom of expression then.

Mapplethorpe's Images.

Accompanying Sorrano's "work" on tour was Robert Mapplethorpe's exhibit of photos of explicit homosexual behavior. One of his photographs depicted two naked men urinating into each other's mouths. His photographic self-portrait depicted a bullwhip protruding from his own anus. Mapplethorpe achieved "gay martyrdom" by dying of AIDS in early 1989.[24]

The public complained bitterly that their hard-earned tax dollars were being wasted on this stupidity, and spurred 143 United States senators and congressmen to demand an end to public sponsorship of such "morally reprehensible trash."

Predictably, defenders of this garbage-as-art used the tried and true First Amendment defense: Howard Fox, curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which hosted the exhibition(ism), whined that "I think it's unfortunate and dismaying that some elements in American society have prevailed upon Congress to consider interfering with artistic expression."[25]

After a Cincinnati jury acquitted the art gallery owners who showed Mapplethorpe's "display" of obscenity, Neoliberal actor Ed Asner remarked that "The decision by the Cincinnati jury on the Mapplethorpe exhibit was phenomenal! After all, I consider the Mapplethorpe picture one man urinating into the mouth of another as merely a depiction of Ronald Reagan's trickle-down theory."[26]

Annie Sprinkle.

The National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) indirectly funded, through the New York State Council on the Arts, Chelsea's Kitchen Theatre, which in winter 1989 sponsored a dozen sex shows by Annie Sprinkle. She has "performed" in more than 150 pornographic movies.

Part of her act involved laying on her back, spreading her legs, and inviting onlookers to inspect her vagina with a flashlight. On several occasions, she paused halfway through her act and boasted "Usually I get paid a lot of money for this, but tonight it's government-funded."[27]

Other Examples of Pornography Funding. The above examples of NEA-funded pornography represent only a small fraction of the obscenities paid for by this Federal "pornocracy." Other examples of pornography that have been funded by the National Endowment of the Arts are listed below.

Burning Bibles.

NEA gave $20,000 to the group Artpark, which in turn gave Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) money to put on a Lewiston, NY show called a "Bible Burn."

SRL posters distributed to art galleries all over the country read;

SRL will create large, sexually explicit props covered with a generous layer of requisitioned Bibles. After employing these props in a wide variety of unholy rituals, SRL machines will proceed to burn them to ashes. Bibles can always be obtained for free from hotels, churches, and your parents' house.[28]

There were no complaints from the anti-censorship organization People for the American Way about book burning. After the City of Lewiston found out about the nature of the show, Artpark sued it.

Degenerates for Sure.

"The Helms Degenerate Art Show/Protest," which was displayed at New York City's Black and White in Color Gallery, received a $500 symbolic NEA subgrant from "Artist Space." This show featured Shawn Eichman's "Alchemy Cabinet," which displayed her own dismembered aborted baby next to the obligatory twisted wire coat hanger; a poster featuring Senator Jesse Helms nailed to a cross; and Dread Scott's "What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag," which invited viewers to walk across an American flag that was spread on the floor.[29]

Tongues of Idiocy.

David Wojnarowicz's "Tongues of Flame" art show featured, among other things, a picture of Christ shooting up heroin; drawings of acts of bestiality; an essay where the "artist" calls Cardinal John O'Connor "that creep in black skirts;" attacks on the Catholic Church using extreme obscenity; and many extremely graphic homoerotic photos. The NEA awarded $15,000 to Illinois State University to host this show.

Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in mid-1992.

S&M Funding.

The NEA granted $5,000 to the Southern Exposure/Project Artaud, which put on an exhibit entitled "Modern Primitives: An Exhibition and Series of Live Events on Contemporary Body Modifications." Features were literary sources in sado-masochistic (S&M) culture; the benefits of extreme S&M; performances of masturbation; and videos of the extreme wounding, cutting, and genital piercing of human beings.

More Homosexual Nonsense.

Almost all of the controversial NEA grants have gone to sodomites.

In addition to the grants mentioned above, NEA funded a photographic journal called Nueva Luz, which consisted of photos of naked children in sexually graphic situations with naked adults.

Another New York NEA-funded exhibit included booklets that showed one female sex pervert inserting various objects into another, a photo album of group sex, a crude 3rd-grade level drawing called "Jesus Sucks," and another photo with a man asking "Is it a sin to f___a priest?"

NEA awarded a grant to the Gay Sunshine Press so it could publish "Orgasm of Light: The Gay Sunshine Anthology." This book included drawings of the Statue of Liberty with a penis, and graphic depictions of bestiality and homosexual orgies.

In 1969, the NEA gave The American Literary Anthology a grant, and it subsequently gave Aram Saroyan more than $500 for his poem that consisted of a single misspelled word: "Lighght." Two years later, the organization gave $50,000 to the theatre troupe Living Stage, whose specialty was to perform before elementary schoolchildren while encouraging them to chant "bullsh_t!" throughout its entire performance. In 1972, it gave Judy Chicago $36,500 for "Dinner Party."[30]

The NEA funded the 1990-1991 "New Festival" in New York State, which included the films "Strip Jack Naked," "Jesus Christ Condom," "Queers Bash Back," "S&M Sex and Music," "Why I Masturbate," "No Skin Off My Ass," "Multiple Orgasm," "Yearning for Sodom," "Portraits of Lesbian and Gay Teens," "Beyond Superdyke," and "Boots, Boobs and B_tches."[29]

In 1990, the NEA gave a grant to Chicago Filmmakers, which put on a radical Neofeminist show entitled "Rattle Your Rage." This included a post entitled "Sister Serpent F___s a Fetus," which had a heading that said "For all you folks who consider a fetus more valuable than a woman, have a fetus cook for you, have a fetus affair, go to a fetus' house to ease your sexual frustration."[31]

NEA even funded Artist Space of New York City, which put on an exhibition featuring a bust of a transvestite Jesus Christ with a crown of thorns, make-up, and breasts.

The Battle Over NEA Funding.

In mid-1990, private citizens and lawmakers who were outraged at the excesses of the National Endowment of the Arts attempted to obtain a guarantee that taxpayers would not have to pay for garbage that deliberately attacked religion or offended the vast majority of people.

NEA chairman John Frohnmeyer, of course, wanted lots of tax dollars but no accountability. During the funding battle, he said that "I wish all those people who know nothing about art would stay the f___ out of my business."[32] In an editorial letter, Frohnmeyer squawked that

Obscenity to these Republicans means what they don't like. As to blasphemy, the images against which some have taken offense could be described as Christ's taking the sins of the world and the cross as a symbol of man's inhumanity to the Son of God. Those are hardly blasphemous concepts, except perhaps to those seeking offense.[33]

As if Frohnmeyer, a political appointee, knew anything about art!

When the debate over NEA funding hit the House floor, conservative Congressmen tried to display Robert Mapplethorpe's perverted images so that they would be broadcast on C-SPAN's live coverage, but Speaker Tom Foley forbade such a showing, allegedly because it would cause "public outrage."[28]

In other words, the Neoliberals were forcing the public to fund material that was literally too filthy for them to see.

When the battle was over, even a minimal Congressionally-approved statute that required the NEA to consider "general standards of decency" was challenged in court by the National Association of Artists' Organizations and four performers whose obscene grant applications were rejected by the NEA in 1990. These 'artists' were Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck and Tim Miller. Predictably, the organization handling the lawsuit was the American Civil Liberties Union.[34]

One of the issues stressed during the Congressional hearings was that the NEA peer review panels are a textbook example of conflict of interest. Panel members rubberstamp certain applications for funding and award each other sizable grants. There is no wonder that artists are struggling to get appointed to these panels; once they do, they have a meal ticket for life!

This is one of the primary reasons that the NEA funds so many offensive works of 'art.'

For example, Karen Finley's "partner," Jerry Hunt, sat on the panel that recommended them both for a $25,000 grant. Holly Hughes, who does a solo act about lesbian desire involving unprintable language and blasphemous imagery about Jesus, had her friend and associate Ellen Sebastian give her $15,000 in 1991.

Janet Kardon, director of the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, sat on the same panels that awarded her institution $155,000, including $30,000 for the controversial Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition.

William Olander, curator of the New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art, sat on panels that gave his Museum $97,000. Gary Young, Director of the Connecticut Commission on Art, sat on panels that gave his institution $374,000.

A New York Times art critic called this "... the buddy system: You give me a grant, I give you a grant."[28]

Despite all of this evidence, Neoliberal congressmen allowed the NEA funding process to remain intact. It seems that ethics are applicable to everyone except congressmen and the 'art' community or whatever pet issue those in power want to protect.


http://www.ewtn.com/library/PROLENC/ENCYC136.HTM


It goes on and on and on... :mad:
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