NB: A photo of a bullwhip in a guy’s butt? You paid for that. The movie about 12-year-olds having lesbian sex? Ditto. Oh, and did you ever get a thank you card for the $12K you gave that experimental theatre company to create a play about the “stigma” of abortion?
Thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts and The National Endowment for the Humanities, your tax dollars have funded all sorts of “art” – from pornography to propaganda to the abjectly stupid and ugly.
Now that the Trump budget proposes doing away with the NEA and the NEH (and PBS and NPR – hah, I just love writing that!) all the usual suspects are moaning about the damage to our culture. All those Sundance films, and Harry Reid’s cowboy poetry festival, and transgressive performance art aimed at questioning the binaries imposed by Eurocentric blah, blah, blah. But most Americans never see what they’re getting for their money, and when they do, they don’t much like it. NEA and NEH et al are welfare for the liberal cultural elite. Check out this unintentionally hilarious defense from Andrea K. Scott in the New Yorker:
For evidence of the inestimable value of the N.E.A.’s work, look no further than the fiction and poetry pages of The New Yorker. To name just two contributors who’ve received creative-writing fellowships: the U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey; and the magazine’s incoming poetry editor, Kevin Young. Or, for that matter, look at your program for “Hamilton”—the N.E.A. helped hatch it.
Those programs must be defended, by God – they produced a New Yorker poetry editor!
But they’ve also underwritten a lot of filth.
My reason: Because they suck, pump out left-wing propaganda and tasteless creepy kitsch, and never once has any congress-creature sought the opinion of the American taxpayer about this junk and whose hard-earned money they pilfer to fund it.
The fallacy is that the NEA actually cares about the education of children….indoctrination is a much better description
Could it be that the government should not use coerced citizen dollars to run its own political propaganda machine against those self-same citizens?
If Hollyweird and progressives love it so much, they can fund it themselves.
Though the next stupidity that follows from libs in retort is this: “Well if you love the military so much, you can fund it.”
Watch. It’s coming.
Yea President Trump. God Bless you.
Cut the funding already!
One of the 1963 goals of communism.
“Make art ugly,repulsive and meaningless”.
We don’t have the money people! These things may be worthless and stupid, but regardless, we have to borrow a trillion dollars a year to keep funding government handouts.
My cats do performance art, and I’m yet to have my application for funding for cat litter to be approved.
Once the stream overflows its banks – or when the levee breaks – le deluge.
Everybody wants a bite of the apple, a piece of the pie, a cut of the swag, … whatever you want to call it … every-fuckin-one wants to delve into the pockets of the taxpayers – for his own benefit – directly or indirectly.
It’s corruption, plain and simple, but we’ve been so mal-educated that we fail to see it. More’s the pity. Even President Trump can’t fix this – if he even recognizes it (which I doubt).
izlamo delenda est …
If a society does not VOLUNTARILY support certain art, why should the government, with our taxes? Shouldn’t art reflect the tastes and values of a culture at-large, not the tastes and values of a very narrow niche? I’m a car guy. I believe automobiles are a form of art, and reflect the tastes of a society. Maybe we should have had the federal government subsidize the Edsel, since the public didn’t “appreciate” it?