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In Minneapolis recently, the Walker Art Center arranged a production of ``Four Scenes in a Harsh Life'' by Ron Athey, an HIV-positive actor- playwright. In his performance, Athey takes a scalpel and carves a pattern into another man's back. The blood from the wounds is then blotted with paper towels and dangled in the air over the heads of the audience.
Major funding for the Walker Center comes from the federal government. This year, it received $104,500 from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Last year's biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York was titled ``Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire.'' Among other delights, it offered a video of a young man spitting blood, a photo of amputated genitalia perched atop two skulls, framed samples of an infant's diaper stains, a giant splash of fake vomit, menstrual blood, and the aforementioned Mapplethorpe and Serrano portraits. Visitors were made to wear badges proclaiming: ``I can't imagine ever wanting to be white.''
The Whitney is subsidized by the NEA. Grants in recent years total well over $300,000.
Photographs by artist Joel-Peter Witkin drew attention when activists tried to display them in the US Capitol. His work includes pictures of a corpse's head sawed in half and repositioned so it seems to be kissing itself; an obese nude woman holding three dead fetuses; and a nude man strapped beneath heavy weights that are suspended above his head by means of a pulley chained to his scrotum. The latter is titled ``Testicle Stretch with the Possibility of a Crushed Face.''
The NEA has given several grants to Witkin, some worth up to $20,000.
A poem published in ``The Portable Lower East Side'' in 1991 exalts the attackers who raped and slashed a Central Park jogger nearly to the point of death. An excerpt:
My soul sinks to its knees &/ howls under the moon rising full,/ ``Let's get a female jogger!''/ I shout into the twilight/ looking at the middle class thighs/ pumping past me,/ cadres of bitches who deserve to die/ for thinking they're better than me./ You ain better than nobody bitch.
The Portable Lower East Side acknowledges ``generous support'' from the NEA.

Warped, hateful stuff. But don't stay up late waiting for the NEA to apologize for this pollution. Instead of conceding, for example, that the bloody mutilation show in Minneapolis was an abomination, NEA chairwoman Jane Alexander insists it was ``a study exploring modern day martyrdom as it relates to AIDS.'' (If you don't understand, you must be a yahoo.)

No one is forced to buy Time magazine or advertise in its pages. It pays for its art with private funds. Yet Time shows more consideration for public sensibilities and opinion than the NEA, whose every dollar comes out of your pockets and mine.

When the NEA was created in 1965, nobody said anything about ``Testicle Stretch'' or glorifying rapists. Elitist and insufferable, it has become as grotesque a travesty as the ones it subsidizes. The time has come to shut it down.