Supporting the arts sounds harmless enough. After all, who doesn’t love music, theater, a good book, or an interesting painting? But the second government steps in and starts spending your tax dollars on what it deems “worthy” art, the whole thing stops being high culture and starts looking like a bad joke at your expense.

This year alone, the Nevada Arts Council will dish out nearly $3.3 million in public money to fund “arts programs.” Translation: $3.3 million forcibly taken from hardworking Nevadans to bankroll projects handpicked by unelected bureaucrats and politically connected art elites.

After reviewing public records and grant allocations, DOGE NEVADA released a report exposing the offensive and outrageous art your money is supporting. 

Among the organizations pocketing your hard-earned money is the Las Vegas-based Women’s Film Festival, which receives $4,900 a year from the Nevada Arts Council. That money paid for screenings of Good Girl, a short film about an OBGYN who pleasures herself to BDSM porn and Tongue in Cheek, a movie about a pop-up oral sex-focused prostitution business.

It doesn’t stop at softcore smut. The same festival featured one-sided political documentaries, environmental rants, and a little gem called Femme Rage, which stars armed “QTBIPOC Femmes” screaming and brandishing weapons as a way to “unleash their rage about living, surviving, and thriving within a cishetero-capitalist-white supremacist-patriarchy.” 

If an adult in Nevada wants to watch avant-garde rage porn, more power to them. But LDS grandmothers in Genoa shouldn’t be forced to pay for it.

Then there’s The Asylum Theatre, a project under the organization Eat More Art Vegas. The theater company raked in over $11,000 in public funds over the past two years. While Eat More Art Vegas has received praise for the plays the group performs, the group’s social media is filled with extremist hate speech that would make Antifa leaders blush.

One taxpayer-subsidized post featured a MAGA hat alongside a Nazi helmet, a confederate soldier’s hat, and Klan hood under the phrase “Same Sh*t. Different Hat.” Other posts state a vote for Republicans is a vote for “hatred, fraud, gun massacres, and rapists” and attacked Gov. Joe Lombardo, who ultimately signed off on the group’s funding.

Even wildly successful artists are cashing in on Nevada’s taxpayers. The Nevada Arts Council handed out $5,000 fellowships to 18 artists this year. One recipient, Frances Melhop, owns a gallery on the shores of Lake Tahoe and sells one piece of art for more than many Nevadans make in a year. Another fellow, poet Ann Keniston, brings home over $120,000 annually as a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. Another lives in a $5.5 million house in swanky Summerlin.

Finally, there’s the Reno Punk Rock Flea Market, which somehow qualified for $4,900 to host “family-friendly” concerts. Some of the artists featured by the Punk Rock Flea Market include bands with names like P*ssy Velour and Slutzville, performing such songs as “Suck Me Dry” and “Kick You in the Balls,” as well as a bikini-clad fire-eater, a heavy metal burlesque show, and a drag queen named Vertigo.

The Reno Punk Rock Flea Market might seem rebellious, but there’s nothing more laughably un-punk than groveling to government bureaucrats for a handout. Filing grant applications and cashing taxpayer-funded checks isn’t edgy—it’s the kind of sellout behavior real punks would sneer at.

These extreme examples of state leaders and bureaucrats misusing tax dollars for art projects isn’t just about nudity, name-calling, or bad taste. It’s about control. When the government decides what art is valuable, we politicize creativity, open the door to government censorship, and alienate taxpayers. Art becomes another tool in the culture war, and taxpayers become unwilling soldiers.

Here’s a radical idea: how about letting Nevadans decide what art they want to support? Rather than robbing a struggling single mother in Minden to fund performance art in Mesquite, let’s allow people to vote with their wallets.

In the age of GoFundMe and Patreon, and with a growing number of art galleries, playhouses, and concert venues across the state, there’s zero excuse to force people to subsidize art they find offensive, elitist, or irrelevant – or any art at all, for that matter.

Art flourishes in a marketplace of ideas, not under the watchful eye of government gatekeepers. Instead of letting bureaucrats decide what qualifies as meaningful or worthy, we should trust individuals to support the art that speaks to them. When funding comes from voluntary support—not government mandates—art becomes more innovative, diverse, and truly reflective of public interest. 

Nevadans should be free to back the art that inspires them, not foot the bill for someone else’s agenda.

Drew Johnson is the Director of Research at DOGE Nevada and a candidate for Nevada State Treasurer. The longtime Nevada resident is credited with saving taxpayers billions of dollars as one of America’s leading taxpayer advocates and government watchdogs.

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