In Wales, at a government-funded exhibition, a performer methodically guzzles bottle after bottle of beer, and then tries to walk on a balance beam in high heels. Huh? It's art, y'see, with a chaser of deconstruction.

Critics of a state-funded art show in which the female performer consumes large quantities of beer have branded it a stupid display of binge drinking and have called for it to be banned.... Audiences at the government-funded Chapter arts centre in Canton, Cardiff, see (Japanese artist Tomoko) Takahashi arrive on stage in high heels and a smart black business suit. For the next three hours, they watch her drink bottle after bottle, periodically lurching towards her beam and seeing how much of it she can negotiate without falling off. Fortunately for her, it is only a couple of feet high, so she is unlikely to suffer more than a twisted ankle.

Unfortunately, some see her one-woman performance art show as less a comment "on the availability and use of mass-produced products", as she claims, and more an exhortation to binge drink.....David Davies, a Tory member of the Welsh Assembly, said: "If anyone is daft enough to want to see a young woman getting plastered and tottering around in high heels, they can do it in just about every city centre most nights of the week. The show is probably the biggest waste of money in the world. The worrying thing is people are deciding to hand out taxpayers' money like this when they are sober."

However, James Tyson, the theatre's programmer, defended the performance, staged as part of the centre's Experimentica 05 season. He said: "Miss Takahashi is an internationally renowned artist. Her work constantly questions the way products are marketed and the role of mass media in society." He added: "This wasn't just about a woman drinking a lot of beer. This was a powerful piece of art."

Powerfully dumb, yes, and even more so that government is sticking taxpayers with the bill. And if we want to explore the roots of alcohol overconsumption in the UK, we should look not to blame the problem on product marketers and the mass media, which is the typical liberal deconstructionist approach to figuring out anything - minus the "institutional racism, classism, and sexism" canards that are usually part of the package, that is. No it's the bleedin' yobs themselves who are to blame.

TECHNORATI TAGS: PERFORMANCE ART, DRINKING, WALES

TO COMMENT: The regular "comment" feature is not in operation. E-mail comments to address under "Contact" on main page masthead, and I'll add them, here.

Tom Rekdal: This is another one of those Catch-22 situations that just seems to be an inevitable part of the way we live now.

The public--certainly the Seattle public, anyway--seems to find nothing objectionable about taxpayer subsidies for anything that could be termed "culture" or "entertainment." The general argument is always cast at a fairly lofty level: Who could be against public libraries, symphonies, or art? Don't they elevate public taste?

Indeed, they do. Yet as soon as the general principle is conceded, anti-discrimination policies, which pervade the legal system, immediately come into play, and we are left supporting bizarre displays like the one you instance here. Neither the public acceptance of cultural subsidies nor the legal policy against "viewpoint" discrimination is likely to change anytime soon.

When the issue of taxpayer subsidies for the baseball stadium first came up, I wrote to my County Councilmember to protest the use of public money for the support of a purely private interest in sports. Her response--perfectly reasonable, under the circumstances--was that she had voted for libraries and could not now vote against baseball stadiums just because some people had no interest in baseball. Other people do, probably more than the number who go to libraries.

You can't win.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at October 26, 2005 09:52 PM