How quickly time passes! It seems only yesterday that we were reporting in this space on Annie Sprinkle’s performance at The Kitchen, the supertrendy performance venue in downtown Manhattan. In fact, it was more than a decade ago, in the winter of 1990, that Miss Sprinkle, the former prostitute and porn star reborn as a “feminist porn activist,” came to entertain and enlighten the hip multitudes that congregate at places like The Kitchen. What captured our interest back then was not so much the particulars of this sexual entrepreneur’s performance—pornographic exhibitionism masquerading as art had already become a bit of a yawn—but the fact that it was paid for in part by … well, by all of us, courtesy of the largess of the National Endowment for the Arts. Back then the NEA was busy handing out cash for all sorts of nasty stuff, the more degrading the better. That policy garnered lots of headlines for the government ag ...

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