Karen Finley is welcome to slap raw meat on herself and scream at the audience about socialism or the evils of capitalism or do whatever she wants. And anyone who likes is free to go see her do so (although I personally find it hard to understand why anyone would want to; but all art is about personal taste, isn't it?). But it's tough for me to buy the argument that the public should be funding it.

Look: with me having to fight every step of the way to get funding for my children so that they can be taught to read; with Washington passing insufficiently funded "No Child Left Behind" legislation that gives the teachers more work but doesn't give us more teachers to do the work; with services and support being cut at the city, state, and national level, I have a very very hard time feeling any sympathy for Finley's position on the public funding of art. If she needs more money, she can hold a bake sale or a rummage sale or something; don't take it from my police and my teachers and my schools and my bus system so that Finley can stick a yam up her butt and moon people. That's just absurd.

Out ragious performance art that neither challenges the audience, nor is destined for a shelf life beyond the object of its scorn! Yams in the ass crack! A fixation with popular figures whose cults of personality are on the wane! Zombie Joseph Bueys skating on the thin ice of intellectual cultural relevance! Imagine! Subversive art whose secret subversion is the fact that it's more voyeuristic entertainment than thunderous challenge! Reduction of Middl[ing] America's psychological makeup into easy-to-digest pejorative traits! Our mothers fucked in the beds that we would crawl into! She baked cakes, she raised hell! I find the dissonance hard to reconcile! Powerful! If Helms didn't like it, it must be incredibly threatening! Like Guy Montag, or marching to Montgomery! I bet you know Kim Gordon! I bet she's a porcelain cannonball! Terri Schiavo! Wow! There's definitely a lot people didn't get to say about her! Because of fascism! I wonder if she put herself into a coma because every time she was raped by her husband, she would pretend she was dead! Maybe the feeding tube was a childhood waterslide! Zowie! It's spiritual! It's gargantuan! Congressmen are digging in where bunker busters dare not go!

Public funding of the arts is not the problem. 195 million dollars a day in Iraq is the problem. And just wait until we go into Iran.

Finley is NOT the "poster girl for the First Amendment", she is the poster girl for self-indulgent exhibitionism. No one is censoring her. She can do all the "performance art" she wants, and anyone who thinks this silliness is "art" is welcome to pay for it. Personally, I wouldn't go see it if she paid ME. Frankly Scarlet, who gives a damn?

anti-establishment art just makes so much sense somehow.

Or not.

I think Helms did her a favor.

But while I found the majority of the article to be the text of a fan too blinded by admiration of an artist to call her on the obvious babble that most of the psychoanalysis of public figures was, I couldn't agree more with the last sentence of this article. I don't even think I believe in an afterlife, but for 6 years now, I've really hoped there is one, just so Bush can suffer in it.

She does have a pretty nice ass, especially for an old chick.

Never heard of him. Is he related to Walter?

I just want to put in a good word for Karen Finley. I'd never heard of her before I read this article, and I think she sounds a) absolutely brilliant, b) corageous, and c) really patient. I'm glad she was able to make some connections with her interviewer, but I think her interviewer totally missed the point of beign told that women are never sublime. The point was that if you make a woman a figurehead like that, a goddess, it's a really sexist thing to do because you're treating her as an object. Then he goes on and does it again by commenting on Karen's tits and ass - he's a perfect illustration of what Karen's pieces are about. And I'm really glad someone as cynical as Karen Finley believes in the soul.

Mr. Bowman is apparently happy to have his mainstream tastes satisfied by Ms. Finley's "nice tits"; I hope he keeps his eyes averted whenever comic or grotesque men have the audacity to reveal their bodies to him.

When will our culture stop being ashamed of and hateful towards the male form?

This question is implicit in the article. Just as the Bush family takes power, official censoring from above sets in. Just as Bush War 1 happens like a HBO miniseries and journalists are frozen out, the government decides that it has a vested interest in what people are creating, and specifically in political protest, or investigating themes like sexuality and religion, both potent cultural concepts that the Republicans want to control.

So now there are sizable strings attached to grants and there are Republicans on the board of CPR. Why do you think that the slack-jawed public voted for the village idiot TWICE? Americans are lulled into complacence by the lack of competing information in the media. There is a PublicSpeak that has been subsituted for real information, a shorthand that has everyone thinking in symbols: Religion: good for America, more of it!; sex: bad and especially feminists; liberals: traitors and dangerous for America.

And it's worked on us too. We second-guess every liberal leader and stand on the issues. No wonder that it also takes alot of effort for liberals to get involved in the political process; we are swimming upstream to do it. The Republicans are literally starving the beast of liberal thinking. And all we are doing is pushing website buttons in protest? What outrage!

Something you can say, at least, for Finley is that she is on the front lines of that fight, and taking knocks for it, on our behalf. I find that to be worth my tax dollars. And if yams in butt cracks makes people pissed off, at least they are experiencing the emotion at last. Please, now, direct them towards the real obscenities going on in the world.