Your Tax Dollars at Work!
The NY Post spills the caviar:

THE best-selling author of "The Corrections," Jonathan Franzen, has blown a taxpayer-funded, $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts on a couple of pricey paintings.

Although it's widely believed that NEA doles out dough on a need basis to starving artists, the bonanza often goes to scribes who are already raking in cash hand over fist. That was the case again this summer when shocked writers everywhere learned that Franzen, this year's National Book Award winner, was taking his turn at the public trough.

But it's OK,

"I used all of it to buy work from a couple of underappreciated visual artists I know," Franzen wrote to ULA head Karl "King" Wenclas, "since visual artists can't get NEAs anymore."

Though some might say that Franzen was at least passing the wealth on to less fortunate artists, Wenclas didn't see it that way. "In other words," he writes on the ULA's Web site, literaryrevolution.com, "Franzen bought two expensive paintings for himself. Not quite someone who needs the funds in order to write!"

Nobody seems to have asked why the taxpayers are funding these grants in the first place.