No, it didn’t take me four years to paint this. I only recently touched it up, hence the 2002 date. This was supposed to be along the lines of my previous painting, State Sponsored Art, but isn’t quite as good.

The idea here is that everyone’s leeching of the government, but in order to divvy up the milk, someone’s got to decide who gets what. The cow with a window is based on a real cow with a window to its stomach that they had in the Agriculture Department of the University of Illinois. Students could experience the thrill of sticking their hands directly into a live cow’s innards.

This painting depicts how you can’t have state sponsorship (of the arts) without state censorship. Someone has to decide who get which grants even though we all pay for them with our taxes. This picture has also been featured on the cover of Lumpen Magazine.