I'm madder than a Republican congressman who's just been outed over a non-same-sex one-night stand he had back when Motel 6 only cost five dollars a night. What's got my 200 thread count, pure combed cotton, Cylon-endorsed Battlestar Galactica bed sheets in a bunch, you blushingly inquire? It's the shame of how the heart's been cut out of those two great American institutions, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Endowment for the Arts!
The government of this grand republic just declared a multibillion dollar surplus, but we all know where that's going: the exact same place they sent the Peace Dividend. Meanwhile, the important work that government should be doing, sending its citizens to other planets and its performance artists on tour, goes unfunded. Sculptures and installations are evidently a little too threatening to the promise-keepin', flag-wavin' lumpenboomers who just won't stop voting. The cost of exploring the only part of our reality that hasn't shrunk to zero scares even contractors whose only contracts are with the Pentagon. The solution is obvious: Revitalize both the NEA and NASA by sending controversial works of art to the moon!
Say the NEA gives some artist money, and then that artist makes the ungrateful gaffe of turning something out that offends an elected official. NASA gets a call, and before you can say "Piss Christ," the offending work is on a rocket to the moon. The lazy cratered satellite that orbits our planet is finally put to use: It becomes a museum of banned art, a sculpture garden of controversy, a gallery of the offensive, a repository of questionable taste and bad decisions. Once the shock of the new has worn off, NASA's called back into action. They retrieve the stuff and return it to its home planet, where it can be safely displayed to everyone in your family, from your televangelist snake-handling Bible-thumping uncle to your canon-busting politically correct multiculturalist co-ed niece. By the time the Guerrilla Girls are grandmas, no one here on the only planet with intelligent life on it in the universe is gonna care about art anyway: a classic win-win situation. And think of all the money that will be saved when nobody has to archive, vault, or restore any of those artworks. There's no atmosphere on the moon, my friends, just like in most art galleries, and no atmosphere means no deterioration. Richard Serra's Tilted Arc will never rust on the moon, and the flesh colors in Jeff Koons's sculptures of his porn star wife will never fade.
Sure, some art is harder to deal with. Performance art, for instance. But think of what zero gravity could do for performance artists! Artists are creative people. They can adapt to any environment, even one where they can't breathe. Ever since the whole "You hate America so much, go make art in Moscow!" gambit was taken out of the game by the end of the Cold War, philistines have searched high and low for a place to tell pesky artists to go. How about the Sea of Tranquillity? It sounds like an artist's retreat anyway. I bet they'd be glad to get a residency up there!
No one will even notice anyone's missing. Ever since the trial of the NEA Four, the attitude of the Miller Lite-ites has basically been: "You wanna shove yams up your ass, lady, do it on the moon, not in MY backyard! Not with MY tax dollars!" If Karen Finley gets $15,000 from YOUR tax dollars to go down to Stop & Shop and pick up some chocolate sauce for her act, that works out to 6/100,000ths of a cent per American. People get incensed over 6/100,000ths of a cent, but they're such snobs that they won't even pick a nickel up off the street and they leave pennies on the counter when they get them in change. That's legal tender, folks! An artist could pick up those pennies and use them to create an installation that directly counters your opinions of love, beauty, and God and then your kid could see it in a museum or a gallery, if Junior knows where one is, and wants to go in. But there hasn't been a video game invented yet that can take Junior to the moon.
Evidently talk radio's got its nation of "I'm a Wage Slave Driving Home Drunk to Watch Reruns--And I Vote!" commuters convinced it's better to throw pennies into sewers than to give them to artists. Artists should get real jobs, like them, and make art on the weekends like they mow their lawns. Those artists will run copy machines in Hell before they get 6/100,000ths of a cent out of YOU!
Now that the guy who supervised the Tanya Tucker Tight Jeans Costume Retro-spective at the Country-Western Hall of Fame Museum and General Store Dinner Theater is in charge of the NEA, I'd suggest he throw Billy Lee Riley's "Flying Saucer Rock 'n' Roll" on the hi-fi and start looking through the NEA's back-catalog to find stuff to put into orbit. He's probably got a lot of time on his hands. How long does it take to fund finger-painting classes for troubled five-year olds and organize touring exhibits of eighteenth-century quilts? And NASA needs all the help it can get. They've completely forgotten what space exploration is all about. It's not about flying around our own damn planet going nowhere doing experiments on spiders and John Glenn. It's about one thing, and one thing only: other planets. Landing on them, planting flags on them, building space stations on them, and populating them. Didn't these Ph.D.'s even see Way... Way Out?
After all the offensive art is removed to the moon, why not send celebrities into outer space to bring it back and broadcast it on prime-time network television? Sell ad space on that show and you've paid for NASA and the NEA well into the next millennium. (It's got to be young, hot celebs, though, like Chris Rock and Jennifer Aniston, so people will watch, not washed-up has-beens like Cheryl Ladd and David Carradine. We're not selling exercise machines here, this is a rocket to the moon!) I'd watch that show every night if it were on after dinner. It would be better than the Superbowl. How about Real World Outer Space? Six kids trapped in a tin can and one misstep from Puck spells certain death for them all. C'mon! MTV can afford this! Or Tom Cruise--he's got everything he ever wanted out of life, surely he'd be willing to risk it. He's about ready to play mature, authority figures by now, anyway. Just throw a little grey in the hair. He should've played the dad in that crappy feature version of Lost in Space with his ex-wife. The star of Top Gun would be perfect for this assignment: "This is Major Tom. I've successfully retrieved the Piss Christ. That's one small step for artists, a giant step for Art."
Let's face it, without artists and space travel, America can't dream anymore, and neither can it wake up. I'm not interested in some Bob Dole-ish retreat into a simulated golden past where fake Edward Hopper paintings in which Henry Winkler is forever serving Ann-Margret coffee hang on the walls of every diner on Earth. I want to go Into the Future. I want to walk on Mars with Karen Finley. Now!
