Meanwhile, back in the Public Sector…

If you spend enough time reading, writing and learning about business, you’re going to encounter a lot of really stupid ideas coming from the Private Sector. You’ll see things like the mortgage industry “adjusting” the rates on a whole bunch of adjustable rate mortgages at bad moments, resulting in a huge number of foreclosures that need never have happened, personal bankruptcies, failed lending institutions and a general increase in our current economic crisis, all because these lenders could not be bothered to consider if the small increase in income they would get by “adjusting” the interest rates would be worth the potential risk. You’ll encounter half-baked business promotions like selling pizzas for 23 cents and not being ready for hoards of people showing up, resulting in riots. You’ll hear accounts of customer service personnel who are not only stupid enough to continue mispronouncing the customer’s name after being corrected three times, but are also stupid enough to then question if they are actually talking to the customer himself…

You will even find documented cases of companies (not just individuals, but actual corporations) playing “practical jokes” on paying customers…

But as bad as all of these stories (and three dozen others that you can review by selecting the tag for “Stupidity” at the bottom of this post) are, there are cases in the public sector each year that are at least as bad, if not worse. Take, for example, the case being reported this week by The Edmonton Sun website, about a performance artist who received a grant for $55,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts (the Canadian equivalent of the National Endowment for the Arts in the U.S.) to build a 300-meter inflatable yellow banana and place it into geostationary orbit over Texas…

Needless to say, a project like this would cost a lot more than $55,000; about $1 million more, in fact, when the cost of lifting the banana into Earth orbit and then inflating it is included. The artist claimed to have failed in his attempts to raise the rest of the money, and announced that therefore there would be no orbital banana. But since CCA policy does not require the grant recipient to actually produce anything, there is no obligation on the “artist” to return the grant money. As far as I can tell, he has produced nothing except a project proposal and a press release, and walked off with the money…

You have got to wonder what, exactly, the granting agency was thinking on this one. In the U.S. the NEA is fairly loose with its money; so long as the work (or in this case, installation) produced is vaguely artistic and bears even a nodding relationship to the work described in the proposal, they’ll probably be okay with it. And they don’t seem to be all that picky about what constitutes something “artistic,” either; I call to mind projects using human waste products as art supplies that were both approved for grant money and enthusiastically received. But even under an NEA grant, you still have to actually produce SOMETHING more than a press release…

Now, I understand the importance of fostering an artistic community, promoting the creative and conceptual freedom to pursue non-traditional art forms, and supporting free thought. I will even, for the sake of argument, accept that art projects that appear completely absurd to a layman like me might have some artistic merit under some strange definition that includes human waste products as anything anybody would ever want to see. But if we’ve reached the point where explaining your idea for an art project but not actually doing one is worth $55,000 to an otherwise rational government agency, then it’s time I dusted off my proposal that the NEA pay me $55,000 to jump around a major metropolitan area pelting randomly selected people with chunks of rump steak and yelling “Ya-HA! Ya-HA!”

Or, I suppose, I could just ask the Canadians to support my project…