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- PEOPLE, Page 89Rock to the Rescue
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- By MICHAEL QUINN/Reported by Wendy Cole
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- That wasn't charity the hot rockers of AEROSMITH gave to
- an art gallery last week -- that was $10,000 worth of
- rebellion. The band made the donation to M.I.T.'s List Visual
- Arts Center to replace a grant from the National Endowment for
- the Arts that had been killed by the NEA'S acting chairwoman,
- Anne-Imelda Radice. The agency head contends that the center's
- "Corporal Politics" exhibit lacks "artistic merit." But critics
- of the decision think it was actually a reaction to the
- exhibit's renderings of human genitalia, including Rona
- Pondick's Milk, a decidedly unsalacious suggestion of female
- breasts fashioned from wax, paper towels and baby-bottle
- nipples. Why would a rock group come to the defense of the fine
- arts? Says Aero smith's Steve Tyler: "If somebody had closed the
- doors to the barns, the bars and the frat houses that we played
- in during the '70s, we would never have had a chance to get our
- music to people's ears. That's happening to the arts community."
- Aero smith's counterattack closely followed a decision by
- composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim to reject an award from the
- NEA, saying the embattled agency is "being transformed into a
- symbol of censorship and repression."
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