No Art! No Art! No Art! by Jeff Goode

Opening monologue from the unfinished play No Art! No Art! No Art!
A vengeful Senator has pressed for the enactment of a national ban on all forms of art.

No Art! No Art! No Art! by Jeff Goode

SENATOR
The artist is a clever beast.
I learned this during my first presidential campaign.
An actor had been hired to do his impression at the convention.
A stand up comic, really. An impressionist.
Sincerest form of flatterer.
Censors had gone over his material.
Handlers had seen the tapes.
It was harmless.
My words, my gestures, my clothing.
Harmless. Wholesome, even.
But then at the convention…
Something in his demeanor.
His tone.
Satirical.

I was a laughingstock.

That’s when I learned.
Never to fight the enemy on his own battlefield.
You cannot outwit a comic on the stage.
You cannot outspeak a poet on the page.
And you cannot outlegislate a politician on the floor of the United States Senate.

Too any of my colleagues try to influence the artists. Censor them. Underfund them.
They were too busy trying to establish themselves as Artistic Directors
And they forgot that we are already their landlord.

So we evicted them. We outlawed art. All of it. The good kind, and the bad.
They didn’t think it was possible.
They thought the people wouldn’t stand for it.
But what is unthinkable on the stage of an East Village cabaret.
Can be accomplished in a few short hours in Congress after a screening of a snuff film and a tasteful exhibition of child pornography.
Nobody speaks up in defense of the Mona Lisa when she’s got her smile wrapped around an enormous black dildo.

And there was no more art. We outlawed it. We banned all of it.
No painting, no sculpture, no music, no theatre, no dance, no film, no art, no art, no art!