Obama Borrows $161 Million from the Chinese for NEA Porn
President Obama continues to lie to the American people with the sycophantic collusion of the State-controlled Mainstream Media. With all the arrogance of history’s best liars: Stalin, Mao, Chavez, he touts absurd token “cuts” in the budget while opening the veins of the American economy to bleed our future. Just one of his thousand cuts is the $161.3 million he is borrowing from the Chinese to give to the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA, at it’s best makes grants to well-funded organizations which could easily stand on their own. But the NEA also funds avant garde artists who could never stand on their own becasue their work is not art and no one in ther right mind would pay a cent for it. Of course, Obama pays millions–millions he has borrowed from the Chinese. Here are a few of the generally offensive garbage projects we are going into hock for.
The NEA has used tax dollars to subsidize pornography, sadomasochism, and other forms of indecency. Here are some selected examples:
•In 1995, the NEA-funded “Highways,” a venue featuring a summer “Ecco Lesbo/Ecco Homo” festival in Santa Monica, California. The festival featured a program actually called “Not for Republicans” in which a performance artist ruminated on “Sex with Newt’s Mom.” The artistic director was Tim Miller (of the “NEA Four”). Former Clinton adviser Paul Begala agreed that items in the published schedule were obscene.65
•NEA grants announced in December 1996 included $20,000 to the “Woolly Mammoth Theater” venue for Tim Miller, one of the “NEA Four” performance artists. He had stripped twice, talked about picking up homosexual prostitutes, and asked members of the audience to blow on his genitals in a 1995 production entitled “Naked Breath.” The NEA also awarded $25,000 to “Camera News, Inc.,” also known as “Third World Newsreel,” a New York distributor of Marxist revolutionary propaganda films.66
•In June 1996, Representative Hoekstra raised questions about “The Watermelon Woman.” The film was funded by a $31,500 NEA grant. It contained what one review described as the “hottest dyke sex scene ever recorded on celluloid.” “I had high hopes that Jane Alexander would forbid further outrages by the NEA, but apparently even she—nice lady that she is—lacks the power and the will to put an end to the NEA’s obsession with handing out the taxpayers’ money to self-proclaimed `artists’ whose mentality is just so much flotsam floating around in a sewer,” said Senator Jesse Helms.67
•Hilton Kramer, in a March 1996 issue of The New York Observer, noted a new “disgusting” Whitney exhibition he characterized as a “jolly rape of the public sensibilities.” The Whitney was showing the work of Edward Kienholz, and “it almost goes without saying that this America-as-a merde [French for excrement] show is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.” The Whitney Museum recently received the largest grant issued by the NEA thus far in 1997—$400,000.
•The Sunday Maine-Telegram, reported on March 3, 1996, that William L. Pope, a Professor at Bates College, received $20,000 grant in the final round of NEA grants to individual performance artists. He intended to use the money for at least two projects. In one, he would chain himself to an ATM machine in New York City wearing only his underwear. In the other, he “plans to walk the streets of New York wearing a six-foot-long white tube like a codpiece. He’s rigged it up so he can put an egg in one end, and it will roll out the faux, white penis.” The Maine-Telegram noted that the NEA individual fellowship program “will go out with a bang, at least with this grant.”
•”Sex Is,” a pornographic video displaying the NEA credit, is still in distribution.
•Bob Flanagan’s “Super Masochist,” featuring sexual torture, and an Andres Serrano exhibit featuring “Piss Christ” were shown at the NEA-funded New Museum in New York City. Flanagan (now deceased) was recently the star of a film at the Sundance Film Festival entitled “Sick,” which showed him nailing his male organs to a wooden plank. “Sick” is also on the 1997 schedule of the New Directors/New Films series co-sponsored by the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Both institutions have been NEA grant recipients, and Lincoln Center chief Nathan Leventhal is one of President Clinton’s nominees for the National Council on the Arts. His nomination is pending in the Senate.
•Ron Athey’s video of his ritual torture and bloodletting, subsidized indirectly through tour promotion at NEA venues like Walker Art Gallery and PS 122 in New York. (Walker Art Center grants actually increased in the year after the museum booked Athey.)
•Joel-Peter Witkin, a four-time recipient of NEA individual fellowships whose photograph of severed heads and chopped up bodies were displayed by Senator Helms on the Senate floor two years ago as evidence of the moral corruption of the NEA (Helms discussed one featuring a man’s head being used as a flowerpot). Witkin was honored with a retrospective at New York’s NEA-funded Guggenheim museum. Even The New York Times condemned the show as “gruesome.”
•Karen Finley, also of the “NEA Four,” brought her new “performance piece” to an NEA-funded venue in Boston.
•Holly Hughes, another of the “NEA Four” (and recipient of a 1994 individual fellowship), brought her act to an NEA-funded institution in suburban Virginia.
•New York City’s New Museum, an NEA-funded operation, hosted a retrospective of the work of Andres Serrano, which once more included an exhibit of “Piss Christ.”
•New York’s Museum of Modern Art, funded by the NEA, hosted an NEA-funded exhibit of Bruce Nauman’s work, also displayed at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, which included neon signs reading “S— and Die” and “F— and Die.”
•The NEA literature program subsidized the author of a book entitled The Gay 100, which claims that such historical figures as Saint Augustine were homosexuals.
