{"id":19268,"date":"2013-10-31T14:22:39","date_gmt":"2013-10-31T18:22:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=19268"},"modified":"2013-10-31T14:38:06","modified_gmt":"2013-10-31T18:38:06","slug":"your-tax-dollars-fund-bus-art-and-a-video-of-a-man-yelling-into-a-woman%e2%80%99s-vagina","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/19268\/your-tax-dollars-fund-bus-art-and-a-video-of-a-man-yelling-into-a-woman%e2%80%99s-vagina\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Tax Dollars Fund Bus Art and a Video of a Man Yelling into a Woman\u2019s Vagina"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this year, the National Endowment for the Arts announced<\/a> it was giving away almost $4 million of taxpayers\u2019 hard-earned cash to artists, museum, theaters and other arts organizations it deemed particularly deserving.<\/p>\n

One of the groups that snagged a federal handout was Freewaves, a Los Angeles-based outfit that creates media art using video, the Internet and mobile devices. The NEA gave Freewaves $25,000 to make two-minute art videos to play on buses in L.A. County. The unfortunate bus riders are subjected to ridiculous clips such as \u201cStreaming (Tautological Transmissions<\/a>),\u201d which shows a loop of a ping pong ball floating in a stream and \u201cCan You See Me<\/a>,\u201d a video of a girl\u2019s blinking eye.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to imagine that taxpayers are getting any value at all out of paying to screen videos such as these on public transportation.<\/p>\n

Regrettably, the taxpayer-funded handouts to Freewaves didn\u2019t stop with the NEA\u2019s $25,000 grant. The <\/strong>California Arts Council, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and Pasadena Art Alliance all gave Freewaves lumps of cash<\/a> recently \u2013 and all four<\/a> of those organizations are partially funded by federal tax dollars.<\/p>\n

When it\u2019s not assaulting the senses of L.A. bus riders, Freewaves uses tax dollars to feature controversial videos such as \u201cBetween<\/a>,\u201d which is currently on the home page of the group\u2019s website. The clip, which would offend many of the taxpayers who helped to subsidize its creation, shows blurry close-ups of various body parts over a bed of muffled talking and electronic whirs, until it concludes with a man yelling repeatedly into a nude woman\u2019s vagina.<\/p>\n

The NEA is a communist-style program that allows government to dictate what constitutes art, as well as what art is worthy of funding, then rips money from the pockets of Americans to fund the art preferred by a few well-placed bureaucrats.<\/em><\/p>\n

Despite the best efforts of many limited government lawmakers to defund the scheme, the NEA still devours $154.5 million in taxpayers\u2019 money annually.<\/p>\n

Rather than having the government take our tax dollars to support the art lawmakers and bureaucrats like, why not just let us keep our money to support the art we personally value? The reality is that if the federal government announced tomorrow that it would no longer fund the NEA, Individuals, foundations and charitable organizations would step up to support art \u2013 and more styles and kinds of arts would emerge as a result.<\/p>\n

Even without the NEA, Freewaves would still be funded if the organization could find enough donors willing to support its unique brand of \u201cart\u201d in the marketplace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this year, the National Endowment for the Arts announced it was giving away almost $4 million of taxpayers\u2019 hard-earned cash to artists, museum, theaters and other arts organizations it deemed particularly deserving. One of the groups that snagged a federal handout was Freewaves, a Los Angeles-based outfit that creates media art using video, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4357,4356,151],"class_list":["post-19268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-freewaves","tag-national-endowment-for-the-arts","tag-nea"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19268"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19270,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19268\/revisions\/19270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}