Karen Finley

So I covered the arts.

And like Karen Finley was a performance artist who used to start.

Can I use any language on this podcast? She used to stuff yams in her vagina as part of her performance art.

So she was pretty extreme.

He was heavily involved in art, and especially sort of weird performance art.

And by weird performance art, I mean sort of prankster funny stuff, not Karen Finley putting chocolate on yourself kind of stuff.

And so he and some of his art friends, and this is important.

This was not his political friends, but some of his art friends went out dressed up as zombies.

[laughs]

And interestingly, it was right at the same time that I was actually studying performance artists like Karen Finley and Holly Hughes.

Holly Hughes came-

Mm-hmm

So eventually what happens is the NEA gets these series of rules about what kind of art that it can fund that are very vague about, you know, maintaining general standards of decency in its appropriations.

And there's these four performance artists, Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller.

Not sure if any of them were ever guests on your show, Brian, but The four of them get their funding pulled.

Their grants are approved and then their funding is canceled because of this rule.

It's not to, you know, say, well, you have to support the president's priorities or whatever.

And that was really what was at stake in the NEA 4 case.

Is there an answer to who won that battle? Didn't the Karen Finley case, you know, and I guess some of the reasons that they were trying to censor her, there was nudity, there was profanity, there certainly was politics.

I think there was poop in one case, something like that.