Your Tax Dollars At Work – small dead animals

“It looks exactly like a giant dried bulls penis.”

62 Replies to “Your Tax Dollars At Work”

Well you do have to admire the steelworker/welder who managed to walk away with $2.5 million for welding a bunch of pipes together. If he’d done something like this working on a pipeline project he might have been fired for his creativity.
When I lived in Vancouver there were a large number of rusting hulks of metal sitting in parks and my assumption was that they were made that size so that people couldn’t steal them to sell as scrap metal. Never could figure out why the hunks of metal were there in the first place though.
As far as the sculpture goes, I think that it is a representation of the sterility of the snivel servent mind or, if the taxpayer were a tree, what they have left after being gouged for various government programs. How about we call it the fleeced taxpayer statue rather than the dried bull penis?

Speedy – I think some real bacon wrapped around that ‘finger’ might speed up the razor blade process.

Paul said: “The amounts we are talking about are miniscule”
Therein lies the problem. Too many bureaucrats have the same mindset, simply because it’s not their own cash. After all, in a federal budget of hundreds of billions, what’s a million here or there?
In my household, we watched the small amounts consistently over many years because that is what has allowed me – an artist and lifetime member of the Professional Photographers of Canada – to retire in a reasonably comfortable manner.
It’s called being ‘prudent’, a word that government employees don’t appear to recognize. Despite recurring deficit budgets, we still spend money on stuff like this that is un-needed and if you were to take a poll, probably unwanted by most Canadian taxpayers.

Where are the metal thieves when you need them?

Does this piece of “sculpture” look like a remains of a burned tree 10 yeras ago.
The thing is, that if you took a 10 years old burned tree, there is no money to be paid, no artiste to be admired by the idiots (not an insult, a medical condition) at the NGC?

Conceptual stalagmite more like it.

Let me trot out a definition to which I can’t really take credit, as it comes from too many sources to pin down: Art is the selective re-creation of elements of reality that the artist finds significant – and believes important enough that they will inform and improve the lives of any who observe his efforts.
I will even grant that the creator of this thing is an artist under this definition.
But then let me ask just what thinking about $2 mil plus of tax-funded,tree-shaped vertical stainless steel will do to inform or improve my life?
Not just rhetorically, of course, because if there is one thing public ‘art’ like this never answers, it is the question of actual value to those who foot the bill. How is my life made better by this thing? Part of my labour, my income, my life, was siphoned off against my will and dropped down a rat-hole pre-selected by my self-appointed intellectual superiors, and the resultant overpriced blot on the landscape raised in our names is then pompously lauded by some nameless buffoon and intellectual fellow-traveller who will tell us what to think about it. How does this make a positive difference in my life?
Or did we all just pay $2 .5 million to have a bunch of bureaucrats on the selection committee improve and inform their own lives?

Art obtained by our “National” Gallery should have a distinct possibility of being as relevant to Canada in the distant future as it may be today. Otherwise the money spent to acquire it is wasted. Diogenes, who first alerted us to this monstrosity, was in Ottawa to visit a show of art from Italy that was created 500 years ago. That art, obviously, is relevant today not only in Italy, but, worldwide. What is the chance of this giant steel pipe matching that? Not much, thinks I.
One day, when we return to a somewhat less “enlightened” view of what is art, this piece and a great many other piles of junk will be gathered up all over Canada and sold for scrap.

So what have you got against giant dried bull penises?
After all, the preferred floggers for administering bastinado to errant
wives under shariah are leather-wrapped dried bull penises.