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comment by rjw
rjw  ·  3856 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: NPR First Listen: Kishi Bashi - Lighght

Wow, great story! I'd like to think that politicians back then weren't all so idiotic - but then can you imagine how a defence of modern art would go down in Congress? I'd love to see a member of the House of Representatives defend this or this. (the second painting is Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III by Barnett Newman, which was the subject of a knife attack in 1986, because modern art is scary and confusing)

Of course, the political backlash was probably just an opportunistic attack on anything publicly funded but that's not such a fun narrative (cf. NPR, welfare)