No tax dollars for smut!
Perhaps someone in the Denver area will start a campaign for that slogan after reading this:
Gov. Bill Owens is weighing in on the debate over an artist given a $5,000 state fellowship grant, after hearing about the works of art that depict sex toys on hooks.
“Obviously, this is offensive and in extremely poor taste,” said Owens, who couldn’t view the piece himself but had it described to him by staffers. The governor is in New York for an awards ceremony for the University of Northern Colorado Business School.
The artist, Tsehai Johnson of Denver, received the fellowship from the Colorado Council on the Arts in 2003.
The work, originally titled “Twelve Dildos on Hooks” and completed in 2000, was one of several pieces submitted to the CCOA by Johnson when she was applying for the fellowship grant.
Johnson changed the title of the piece to “Large Implements on Hooks” before officially submitting the work to the council.
She told 9News in an interview that she changed the title for artistic reasons.
“I wanted the title to be a little more open-ended so that it didn’t become so easily dismissed,” she said.
Johnson described the piece to 9News: “They’re meant to be sex toys, but sex toys that are talking about a lot of issues.”
Oh.
Let’s see. You have a city that is in the midst of a budget crisis right now and yet they somehow found $5K to pay for THAT?
Ah well … at least it wasn’t something described as “art” displayed in the state DOJ cafteria or anything like that.