From Art Lessons: Learning From the Rise and Fall of Public Arts Funding, by Alice Goldfarb Marquis:

Three weeks after arriving on the job, [NEA Chairman John Frohnmayer] met with senior staff for the first time, in a crisis over another inflammatory exhibition funded by the NEA. "Against Our Vanishing" was scheduled to open at New York's Artists Space in two weeks. Ostensibly a protest against society's indifference to AIDS, it included nudity, but, even worse, the catalog contained desperately crude ravings by an artist who would soon die of AIDS. "At least in my ungoverned imagination," wrote David Wojnarowitz, "I can f*** somebody without a rubber on, or I can in the privacy of my own skull douse [Jesse] Helms with a bucket of gasoline and set his putrid ass on fire or throw [archconservative] Rep. William Dannemeyer off the Empire State Building." As approved the previous year, the gallery's grant application had promised a show dealing with "sexual dependency ... in the work of contemporary artists." The catalog, it said, would include essays by art critics.

Because the exhibition did not match what was described in the application, the endowment tried to retrieve its grant money and to remove its name as a sponsor from the catalog. Artists Space refused; its only concession was to change a reference to New York's Cardinal Joseph O'Connor in Wojnarowitz's diatribe from "a fat f***ing cannibal" to "a fat cannibal."

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