October 05, 2010
What they”ll never explain in plain, unadorned language is what precisely their giant brown glob is supposed to mean and why they cost $100K a pop, paid for largely by citizens who would wish them away if only they could.
If forced to admit that their multilayered post-post-pre-postmodern dalliances are perhaps a smidge overpriced and wasteful, they”ll divert your attention to all the money we”re wasting on war and corporate welfare and prisons and drugs. Points noted. But we”re still wasting money on art that no one would buy if they had a choice”at least at the price we”re paying for it.
In daring to criticize the very notion of publicly funded art, one risks being accused of aesthetic uptightness and all-around cultural squareness. One recalls the NEA kerfluffles about anally inserted bullwhips and urine-immersed crucifixes and how the “religious right” was hell-bent on “censoring” people who shove yams up their asses and expect you to pay for it.
Lemme tell you something: I”ve published things that would make Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano blush. I have no hang-ups about “extreme” subject matter. But never once amid my various forays into literary transgression did it occur to me that the government or other citizens should be required to pay me anything for it if they didn”t want to see it.
Public art is, by definition, art that no one wanted to pay for privately. If these people were truly artists as the term is commonly understood”people who are driven by creative passion and vision rather than money”they”ll continue to create their dubious metallurgical Meisterwerks without the integrity-compromising taint of government money. If it’s really the art rather than the money that drives you, let’s remove the money and see whether that’s true.
In this equation, those who are truly hung-up are not the Average Joes and Janes who have good reason to bitch about paying for hundred-thousand-dollar cow turds. Instead, the artists are the uptight ones this time around. Underlying their tantrums and screams of censorship is the understandable fear that if it wasn”t for the government, no one would pay a dime for their art. Forget about the reputedly unenlightened hicks who don”t “get” your conceptual installations; if you have to force those hicks to pay for it, the one who doesn”t “get” it is you.
Art, like religion, is based mostly on intangibles and therefore has no place in government. Therefore, I believe the time has come to declare a complete separation of art and state.
There are two things I know about artists and their hands:
1) They tend to have a lot of time on them.
2) They typically have never spent any of that time actually getting those hands dirty.
I”ve known many artists, and the only ones who were starving were those who”d blown that month’s trust-fund check on cocaine.
So let the artists starve for a change. Let’s remove the bottle from the babies” mouths. Force them to live by their wits. In the long run, their art will be better for it.
