Heres a dumb question about 2 adams

[tim atherton]

"Of course I think Teddy Rossevelt was the last great US
President.

--Frank Petronio"

wow - you're a lot older than I imagined Frank....

[tim atherton]

totally OT (but you brought up the Onion Paul...)

Over on apug there is a thread about NEA Grants and notoorious photographs at taxpayers expense and it reminded me of one of my all time favourite Onion news pieces:

Republicans, Dadaists Declare War On Art

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29798/print
(worth checking for the picture)

WASHINGTON, DC—Citing the "proliferation of immoral and offensive material throughout America's museums and schools," and waving placards emblazoned with agit-prop fotocollage reading, "diE KUnst ISt tOT, DadA ubEr aLLes" ("Art is dead, dada over all"), a coalition of leading Republican congressional conservatives and early 20th-century Dadaists declared war on art in a joint press conference Monday.

Anti-art crusaders Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) and Dadaist provocateur Tristan Tzara call for the dismantling of the institutions regulating public art in a joint press conference Monday.
Calling for the elimination of federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts; the banning of offensive art from museums and schools; and the destruction of the "hoax of reason" in our increasingly random, irrational and meaningless age, the Republicans and Dadaists were unified in their condemnation of the role of the artist in society today.

"Homosexuals and depraved people of every stripe are receiving federal monies at taxpayer expense for the worst kind of filth imaginable," said U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC), a longtime NEA critic.

Dadaist Jean Arp agreed. "Dada is, like nature, without meaning. Dada is for nature and against art," he said.

Added nonsense-poet Hugo Ball, founder of Zurich's famed Cabaret Voltaire: "...'dada' ('Dada'). Adad Dada Dada Dada." Donning an elaborate, primitivist painted paper mask, he then engaged reporters in a tragico-absurd dance, contorting wildly while bellowing inanities.

Helms, well known for his opposition to arts funding, was adamant in his demand for the elimination of the NEA from the national budget.

"The American people will no longer stand for vulgar, nonsensical displays that masquerade as art," said Helms, who, along with U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), demanded the passage of obscenity laws granting police and government officials broader powers in the prosecution and censorship of art.

In a show of solidarity with the Republican legislators, Andre Breton, who founded the surrealist movement in 1923, fired a pistol at random into the crowd, conceptually evoking the hideous irrationality of the collective unconscious and wounding Hatch.

Urging reporters to "imagine a boot stamping on a face, eternally," Breton, along with Max Picabia, the most radical anti-art proponent within the Dadaist camp, then theatrically demonstrated Helms' vision. In a collaborative staged "manifestation," Picabia pencilled a series of drawings, which Breton erased as Picadia went along.

"So-called modern art is, at its core, an absurd and purposeless exercise," Helms said, echoing the Dadaists' illustration of the meaninglessness of art. He then announced the Gramm-Helms Decency Act, a bill that would facilitate the legal prosecution of obscenity, as well as establish stiffer penalities for the creators and exhibitors of "morally objectionable works."

Dadaist leaders were even more strident than Helms, stressing the need for the elimination of not only art, but also of dada itself. "To be a Dadaist means to be against dada," Arp said. "Dada equals anti-dada." Urging full-scale rioting, the assembled Dadaists called for their own destruction, each of them alternately running into the audience to pelt those still on stage with tomatoes.

In a gesture honoring Helms and the new bill, seminal anti-artist Marcel Duchamp drew a moustache and beard on a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Duchamp titled the resultant image "L.H.O.O.Q.," a series of initials which, when pronounced in French, forms the sentence "Helms au chaud au cul," or "Helms has hot pants."

Centered in Berlin, Paris and Zurich, the Dadaist movement was launched as a reaction of revulsion to the senseless butchery of World War I. "While the guns rumbled in the distance," Arp said, "we had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a means of deadening men's minds."

When told of Arp's comments, Helms said he was "fairly certain" that he concurred.



(what was that about silly and on course...?)

[Kirk Gittings]

Oddly enough and contary to my nature, I had a role in Helms' attach on the NEA. In condeming Serrano, Mapelthorpe and my friend Barbara DeGeneveve he held up my NEA funded book on New Mexico churches (Monuments of Adobe) and declared that the NEA should be funding more books like mine instead of the filth of these other artists. Or so I have been told by a very amused Barbara DeGeneveve who was at the hearings defending her work. If Helm's had informed me of his plan, I would most have certainly been present to defend Serrano, Mapelthorpe and Degeneveve.

[paulr]

Tim, that gave me a stomach ache.

in my next life i want to be smart enough to write for the onion.

Kirk, that's a tough spot to be in. remember it's never too late to show solidarity by peeing on a crucifix.

[Paul Butzi]

the conservative, capitalistic arguments would work if people seemed more willing or able make decisions based on a long view rather than short-term gain. this is what i see as fundamental to our failures at land stewardship.

Yes.

Also the liberal, socialist arguments of the environmentalists ("you don't own your land, you just hold it in trust for the future") would work if people seemed more willing to front the cost of the decisions.

That is, when someone tells me that I should have 1000' riparian setbacks in my forest, I politely invite them to pay the costs I would incur.

I don't understand why it's not really my property when it comes to making decisions about how to manage it, but it suddenly becomes ALL my property when it comes time to pay the piper for the decisions.

Maybe you can explain that to me.

You want more quality filtration for the watershed I live in? That's fine. I"m happy to provide it if you'll just pay me for it. I don't see why I can't provide quality riparian habitat left, right, and center if it's a product I'm selling. Same thing with the wildlife habitat - it's a dandy alternative forest product. I'll make more if I get paid for it. (although not much more, since I already manage for that). So will every other private forest owner I know.

It wouldn't be hard to raise the money to buy such products. Just put a tax on vast areas of manicured lawn fertilized out the wazoo and carefully tended with thousands of cubic feet of water each summer. Put a tax on every land parcel that is covered more than 50% with impermeable surface. Put a tax on every running foot of stream that goes through a culvert and every foot of storm sewer piping.

[Frank Petronio]

What a perfect example of elitism in action. If polled, I bet 70% or more of American taxpayers would be upset that the NEA funded Maplethorpes and Serano. But democracy - what a silly idea.

Helms was, of course, a democratic populist for most of his career.

[Kirk Gittings]

Helms simply desired his own elitism based in what we all know now was his sham right wing christian morality. It was the taxpayers who funded his populist penis adventures after all. This was not populism but pandering to a likeminded hypocritical base.

[Kerik Kouklis]

If polled, I bet 70% or more of American taxpayers would be upset that the NEA funded Maplethorpes and Serano.

And the only "artist" that most of those 70% have ever heard of is likely Thomas Kincaide or Anne Geddes. Sorry, but those aren't the folks I want choosing who gets NEA funding.

[paulr]

"What a perfect example of elitism in action ..."

Yes, and I think the NEA is a success story of elitism.

It's another example of how a representative democracy is a fundamentally elitist system, in the objective sense of the word. I don't want my uneducated neighbors making foreign policy decisions, I want people who know about foreign policy but who represent my interests, or at least the common good.

For the same reasons I don't want those same neighbors to be handpicking art that gets federally funded. Kerik is right about what the results would likely be. Better to have a peer review panel--or some other panel of people who know more than the average joe, and who are therefore memebers of an elite, pick the art.

I would argue that it's for the common good to have the art picked by such a panel--even if significant numbers of people would be surprised by the decisions. for whaever its worth, I'm lukewarm toward mapplethorpe's work, and strongly dislike serano's. but i don't begrudge their funding because the work isn't to my taste.

On the other hand I do think that it's in the intersts of the NEA, and other arts organizations, to fund work that the public has a fighting chance of connecting with. Mapplethorpe would fit the bill here, because of his clacisism and the prettiness of his work, even when the subjects are controversial. Funding work like Serano's, however, may amount to public art shooting itself in the foot. If people consistently see their money funding work that they are flat out outraged by, this will only serve to erode public support for the arts, and harden artist's reputations as having concerns that are separate from everyone else's. I'd rather see public money building bridges to the people rather than burning them. I believe it can be done--has to be done--with good work and without condescention. But it also has to be done with sensitivity.

[Paul Butzi]

I see. It's ok to take the money from the 70%. It's just not ok to let them get uppity and start having opinions about art.

Talk about elitism.

That's pretty much the crowning post on a thread about the elitist attitudes of artists, isn't it? "Just shut the hell up. We don't want your pathetic, ignorant opinions. We just want your god damn money. No, you don't get to choose which art you fund, because you'd just pick crappy art, because you're uneducated, and we are Educated Artists and we know more than you do."

That's just pathetic. Really, it's just totally pathetic. Do you have ANY idea of how much that makes me want to cut all government funding for the arts?