Waste of the Day: Throwback Thursday – Art Installation Oddities

Topline: Critics often target taxpayer-funded artwork as a waste of federal funding, and the 54th International Art Exhibition in Venice, Italy, is one of the best examples.

Government-funded art

The gallery featured a military tank with a treadmill on top, a “custom-made pipe organ with an automatic teller machine (ATM),” and other abstract sculptures. The U.S. State Department Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs spent $350,000 on it in 2011, or just over $500,000 in today’s money.

That’s according to the “Wastebook” reporting published by the late U.S. Senator Dr. Tom Coburn. For years, these reports shined a white-hot spotlight on federal frauds and taxpayer abuses. 

Coburn, the legendary U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, earned the nickname “Dr. No” by stopping thousands of pork-barrel projects using the Senate rules. Projects that he couldn’t stop, Coburn included in his oversight reports.   

Coburn’s Wastebook 2011 included 100 examples of outrageous spending worth nearly $7 billion, including the $350,000 on abstract sculptures.

Key facts: The Indianapolis Museum of Art spent $1.5 million on the exhibition, of which $350,000 came from the Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs. 

It featured work by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, a Spanish-speaking duo living in Puerto Rico whose performance-art sculpture “Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on ‘Ode to Joy’ for a Prepared Piano” had been on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The sculpture showcased a musician standing in a hole cut in the middle of a piano and playing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” backwards.

Other examples of bad art

The Venice gallery’s performance-sculptures included “Body in Flight (Delta),” in which a female gymnast used a first-class plane seat from Delta Airlines as a balance beam. “Track and Field” had an Olympic runner on a treadmill atop a British military tank. “Armed Freedom Lying in a Sunbed” showed a bronze statue of a neo-Classical woman lying in a tanning bed.

Search all federal, state and local salaries and vendor spending with the world’s largest government spending database at OpenTheBooks.com. 

Critical quote: Roberta Smith, co-chief art critic at the New York Times, said in her review of the International Art Exhibition, “I don’t much care for it … The artists resort to rather violent juxtaposition. They simply slam different things together — objects, bodies, skills and functions — and let the symbolism fall as it may, which tends to be obviously and simplistically.”

Background: Government-funded sculptures are not unique to Italy. The State Department has paid to display artwork in 189 countries through its “Art in Embassies” program, including cities like Beijing and Mo

Summary: Art is open to interpretation, but there is nothing abstract about the $350,000 missing from America’s bank account

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.