Throwback Thursday: In 1979, Helicopter Used for Party Hats Art Project
In 1979, the National Endowment for the Arts spent $1,000 — $4,088 in 2022 dollars — on a Hawaiian art project that entailed a helicopter filming 400 people below wearing colorful party hats.
For this wasteful spending, the NEA received a Golden Fleece Award from Sen. William Proxmire.
Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, gave awards to wasteful and nonsensical spending, eventually handing out 168 Golden Fleece Awards between 1975 and 1988.
For the art project — funded by a larger $20 million federal-state matching funds program — dubbed the “Hanauma Bay Colored Headcovers Happening,” a rented helicopter filmed the people below as they sported the “shiny, paper party hats color coded to the wearer’s sex and race,” Proxmire said at the time.
The project was part of the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, considered “contemporary environmental conceptual art.”
A group of art students and a professor at the University of Hawaii came up with the idea for the project.
“Contemporary art, and this is contemporary art, is conceptual,” Proxmire quoted the professor as saying. “Meanings are layered, referring to things and ideas that are not there.”
Proxmire said he supports the free expression of artists, but argued federal funds — taxpayers’ money — shouldn’t be used to pay for it.
“While the amount of money involved in this project is relatively small and therefore worthy of only a runner-up Fleece Award, a significant portion of federal funds is spent without any federal oversight,” he said at the time. “This mindless method of spending is exactly why there is so much waste and so little accountability in government spending.”
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