Michael Byrne’s ‘Farting In A Wine Bar’ Art Installation Gets Funded By The NEA. America, We Are Officially Done.
NEW YORK, NY – In a move that has somehow simultaneously angered art snobs, fiscal conservatives, and anyone who has ever smelled a particularly aggressive legume, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has confirmed it is doling out a cool $75,000 in taxpayer dollars to fund “Echoes of the Subterranean,” a new performance art piece by critically-acclaimed pretension machine Michael Byrne. The piece, which you and I would call “farting in a wine bar,” is set to premiere at a Williamsburg venue next month, and I’m already saving my popcorn money.
Let’s get the basics out of the way first, because I know your blood pressure is spiking. “Echoes of the Subterranean” is exactly what you think it is. According to the official press release, which I have read three times while weeping softly, the piece involves Byrne, 47, spending eight hours a day for a week seated at a reclaimed-wood table inside a Brooklyn wine bar. He will be wearing a hand-woven hemp suit. His only action? He will “release a series of percussive, intentional flatulences” into a custom-made, acoustically-optimized chamber that resembles a vintage wine decanter. The decanter is then connected to a series of tubes that channel the sound—and, one assumes, the aroma—into a “shared listening space” where patrons can pay $45 for a “tasting flight” of the experience.
I am not making this up. I wish I were. I wish this were a fever dream induced by eating too much gas-station sushi. But no, this is real, and it’s funded by your money and mine.
Before you get the pitchforks, let’s establish who Michael Byrne is. He’s not some random guy who discovered a talent for gastrointestinal performance. He’s a darling of the Brooklyn art scene, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and the same visionary who brought us “The Sorrow of the Wedge,” a 2019 exhibit where he simply cried into a wedge of Parmesan cheese for six hours. Critics called it “a devastating commentary on dairy-based grief.” The cheese, I should note, was later auctioned for $12,000 to a hedge fund manager who claimed it “changed his relationship with lactose.”
So, yes, Michael Byrne is a known quantity. He’s the kind of artist who makes you question whether the entire concept of “art” is just a massive, elaborate prank being played on people who have too much disposable income and not enough real problems. And now, he’s doing it with his butt.
The NEA, in their infinite wisdom, awarded the grant through their “Creative Placemaking” initiative. The official rationale, buried deep in a .pdf file that I imagine was written by a sentient AI that only reads performance art manifestos, states that the project “explores the liminal space between the private, internal act of digestion and the public, external performance of social anxiety.” It goes on to say that the “acoustic flatulence” will “deconstruct the hierarchical power dynamics of the wine bar, a space traditionally associated with bourgeois refinement and olfactory suppression.”
Translation: Farting is deep, actually, and you’re just a hater if you disagree.
The backlash, predictably, was immediate and glorious. Ben Shapiro, who I swear has an alert system for this kind of thing, immediately released a 17-minute monologue titled “The Woke Left Is Now Funding Farts.” Reddit’s r/art (which is usually a den of insufferable pedantry) has been flooded with AITA posts from people asking if they’re the asshole for laughing at the news. The top response, naturally, is “NTA. The NEA is the asshole. And so is Michael Byrne’s colon.”
But here’s the thing that makes this story truly, deeply American: the wine bar. The venue, “Le Soufflé Oublié,” is the kind of place where a glass of natural wine costs $28 and comes with a 10-minute lecture from a sommelier who hasn’t smiled since 2014. Owner Eleanor Vance, who has a degree in “Fermentation Studies” from a school I’m pretty sure is just a shed in Vermont, defended the installation with the kind of earnestness that makes you want to scream into a pillow.
“We are honored to host Michael’s work,” Vance told the New York Times, her voice dripping with the unearned confidence of someone who has never had to pay a real electric bill. “The wine bar is a cathedral of performative consumption. By introducing the element of genuine, unfiltered biological reaction, we are stripping the space of its pretense. Michael is not farting. He is *performing* the act of *un-pretending*.”
Ma’am, he is farting. He is letting it rip. And you are charging $45 for people to hear it through a glass tube.
The internet has, of course, done what the internet does. Twitter (X, whatever, it’s still Twitter) is a war zone. One user posted, “I’m not saying the NEA should be defunded, but I am saying that if you can get a grant for farting into a decanter, maybe we should redirect that money to teaching people how to use a turn signal.” Another, clearly a Redditor who has never left the house, argued that “the real art is the NEA funding this instead of anything else. It’s the ultimate critique of government spending.” That’s called copium, my friend.
And here’s where the cynicism really sets in. This is a perfect storm of everything wrong with the American art world, the American government, and the American cultural conversation. You have a guy who has figured out that the more absurd his work is, the more attention—and therefore, funding—he gets. You have a government agency that is so terrified of
Final Thoughts
Based on the article, Michael Byrne seems to embody a particular strain of unsung dedication that the public often overlooks—the kind of career defined less by headlines and more by quiet, relentless competence. While the specifics of his work may not have made him a household name, the article suggests his real legacy lies in the structural impact he had behind the scenes, shaping outcomes in ways that only become clear in hindsight. In the end, Byrne’s story is a necessary reminder that the most durable influence in any industry is rarely the loudest, but rather the most consistent.