Kansas City Strip

Cow chips: We continue to be udderly awed by the fever of the controversy surrounding the Cow Parade, a “community art” project wherein local artists paint 300 fiberglass cows in a “charity” fundraiser for the zoo, the Kemper Museum, and the American Royal. Local arts boosters want to bring the project to town, even though it’s quickly growing stale after runs in Chicago and New York. But the stink here is tame compared to the moo-haha elsewhere.

The New York Times reports that the Swiss government originally conceived the project as a way to beef up the country’s reputation after it failed to return Holocaust victims’ Swiss bank-account money to their families. But the PR plan didn’t work so well when the Swiss sent 50 cows to New York so schoolchildren could paint them — it turned out the things had been made out of “a material that, when exposed to flame, transformed the glossy figures into Roman candles.” The cows had been made not in Switzerland but in Bosnia.

Then the Swiss accused Jerome D. Elbaum, president of the U.S.-based Cow Parade Holdings, of swiping the project’s international copyright; Elbaum blamed the Swiss for planting a spy in his American operations; and Roland Muller, the Swiss designer of the cows, considered going to court to stop the New York installation because he hadn’t been paid.

Kansas City is dealing with Cow Parade Holdings, and when we queried cow-pusher Karen Holland about whether that company was the project’s legitimate owner, she told us only that “this is the one that’s actually doing the show in New York presently and did some of the work on the Chicago show.”

Arguing that bringing the project to Kansas City reeks of unoriginality, some locals have suggested finding another kind of animal to decorate — but that idea isn’t so fresh, either: New Orleans has a similar project using fish; Peoria, Illinois, has employed pigs; and Miami officials are contemplating a dolphin or flamingo display. But those projects might as well be cow pies, Elbaum has said: “A flamingo does not lend itself to art…. You speak to artists, serious artists, and they only want to paint cows.”

Obviously Elbaum hasn’t spoken to Kansas City’s artists, some of whom have investigated the possibilities of contracting to paint a cow and then leaving it blank in protest.

So what’s a hapless Kansas City to do? In an effort to find an icon that can be pressed into a fiberglass mold and made into an easily recognizable figure that people all over the world will associate with our area, we suggest media superstar and Kansan Fred Phelps. If the project backers are determined to use animals, however, we recommend the figure so revered by Linda Holloway and the Kansas Board of Education: Australopithecus Afarensis — who might also be known as Adam.