Some outstanding grants that have been bestowed by the National Endowment for the Arts:

• $1,000 from NEA-funded American Literary Anthology to poet Adam Saroyan for his one-word poem consisting of the misspelled word "Lighght."

• $50,000 to Living Stage, which performed in public schools and had elementary schoolchildren shout "bulls***" throughout the group's performance.

• $6,025 to Ann Wilchusky for "sculpting in space," that is, throwing crepe paper out of an airplane.

• $40,000 to the Gay Sunshine Press to publish "alternative publications," primarily with sexually explicit homosexual themes, including detailed descriptions and illustrations of group sex among men and between men and animals.

• $30,000 to the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia to put together "Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment," a show that eventually went on tour. Photographs included a self-portrait of the photographer with a bullwhip protruding from his rectum, photographs of one man's arm (up to the forearm) in another man's rectum, one man urinating into another man's mouth, a close-up of a man sticking his "pinkie" finger up his penis, and a little girl with her skirt lifted, exposing her genitals. (On viewing the controversial "XYZ Series" at a Washington gallery, one viewer commented, "I've been here four times already and this show disgusts me more each time I see it.")

• $75,000 to the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. $15,000 went to artist Andres Serrano, who was selected for his use of body fluids in photography. "Piss Christ" featured Christ on a cross in a vat of the artist's own urine.

• $17,500 to the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle for the "Modern Primitives" exhibition, which featured photographs of tattoos and ritualistic body piercing, including genital piercing. COCA also used NEA funds to sponsor an event involving two naked women covered with paint rolling around on paper.

• $5,000 to Southern Exposure to support a series of exhibitions that included the "Modern Primitives" exhibition described above, plus live shows including an "autoerotic scaffold."

• $20,000 to Artpark, an arts festival which included a "Bible Burn," the intention of which, in the words of its organizers, was to "create large sexually explicit props covered with a generous layer of requisitioned Bibles. After employing these props in a wide variety of unholy rituals, ... machines will burn them to ashes."

• $127,000 in 1990 and $125,000 in 1989 to The Center on Puppetry Arts, which featured a puppet show that included oral sex between puppets.

• $70,000 seasonal support grant to Artists Space, which in turn funded "Degenerate with a Capital D." The exhibit included "Alchemy Cabinet" by Shawn Eichman, featuring the remains of the artist's own aborted baby. Another exhibit was Dread Scott's "What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag" which invited viewers to walk across an American flag spread across the floor.

• An unspecified amount for a militant feminist show, "Rattle Your Rage," which featured a multimedia collection that shows three male figures down on their knees, hands bound, penises stretched out on a block with the heads of their organs chopped off.

• $204,390 to the Franklin Furnace of New York City (along with a state grant of $73,370), which put on a feminist performance art exhibition, "The Second Coming." The show included one lesbian inserting her foot into another lesbian's vagina, an 86-year-old woman boasting of sexual escapades with teenagers, priests shown in sadomasochistic situations, and group sex photographs. One otherwise tame photograph of a woman breastfeeding an infant was titled "Jesus Sucks." The title of a photo of a newborn infant with its mouth open suggested that the infant was available for oral sex.

• Other grants over several years to New York's Furnace Theater, which featured the performance art of Johanna Went. Went relies upon props such as giant body tampons, satanic bunnies, three-foot turds, and dildos. The high point of her show, according to the Village Voice, was her "giant vagina headdress which she squeezed as white liquid gushed from her mouth."

[Ed.: Yes, the NEA also funds art that appeals to mainstream taste. Offensive aberrations are dismissed as infrequent, and endowment board members feign irresponsibility since requirement-free grants are usually distributed to mediating private institutions, not to artists themselves. It is also said the avant-garde is both important and undefinable, raising the question of how board members can forsee which art is worthy without recourse to a dart board. Finally, proponents of arts funding complain that any attempt to impose up-front content restrictions on grants imposes cruel 'censorship.']

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